"The politicians always told us that the Cold War stand-off could only change by way of nuclear war. None of them believed that such systemic change was possible."
-Lech Walesa
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"Our national history has so often filled us with bitterness and the feeling of helplessness.“
-Lech Walesa
posted in History
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"My youth passed at the time of the country's reconstruction from the ruins and ashes of the war in which my nation never bowed to the enemy paying the highest price in the struggle."
-Lech Walesa
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"I belong to a nation which over the past centuries has experienced many hardships and reverses. The world reacted with silence or with mere sympathy when Polish frontiers were crossed by invading armies and the sovereign state had to succumb to brutal force."
-Lech Walesa
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"The sole and basic source of our strength is the solidarity of workers, peasants and the intelligentsia, the solidarity of the nation, the solidarity of people who seek to live in dignity, truth, and in harmony with their conscience."
-Lech Walesa
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"Our firm conviction that ours is a just cause and that we must find a peaceful way to attain our goals gave us the strength and the awareness of the limits beyond which we must not go."
-Lech Walesa
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"I belong to the generation of workers who, born in the villages and hamlets of rural Poland, had the opportunity to acquire education and find employment in industry, becoming in the course conscious of their rights and importance in society."
-Lech Walesa
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"Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers."
-Carlos Fuentes
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"If I had been elected president in 1948, history would be vastly different. I believe we would have stemmed the growth of Big Government, which had begun with the New Deal and culminated with the Great Society."
-Strom Thurmond
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"For most of our history, Americans enjoyed both liberty and security from foreign threats."
-Harry Browne
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"There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history. It is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations."
-Claude Vorilhon
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"This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry?"
-Azar Nafisi
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"What would be the nicest thing I could say about Newt Gingrich? He may be one of the great supporters of the humanities, because you have people who don't want to study the social sciences, because it's not profitable, and now Newt, as the highest-paid historian in American history, may be an encouragement to people to study history."
-Barney Frank
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