Talk:Poland

Unsourced

 * I judged the Poles by their enemies. And I found it was an almost unfailing truth that their enemies were the enemies of magnanimity and manhood. If a man loved slavery, if he loved usury, if he loved terrorism and all the trampled mire of materialistic politics, I have always found that he added to these affections the passion of a hatred of Poland. She could be judged in the light of that hatred; and the judgment has proved to be right.
 * Gilbert K. Chesterton, British writer, in Introduction to Letters on Polish Affairs by Charles Sarolea (1922)
 * How come it's "unsourced"? The source has been given and can be easily verified e.g. here: https://archive.org/details/lettersonpolisha00sarouoft


 * In this country [Poland] I would like only one thing: to stay here...
 * Hugo Steinhaus


 * It is a very beautiful country. Now I understand why one can love it so much.
 * Pierre Curie, while visiting Poland


 * Poland is a hell for peasants, a purgatory for townsmen, a gold mine for foreigners, a heaven for nobles and a paradise for Jews.
 * A saying from the First German Dictionary


 * (...) the Poland of the fifteenth century was one of the most civilised states of Europe.
 * Poland. A historical sketch (1885)
 * Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, German General Field Marshal


 * We're talking about Poland. Nothing is usual there.
 * Andrzej Sapkowski


 * "For my Poles, nothing is impossible". Napoleon Bonaparte

Clarify

 * I am Polish enough to sacrifice all music of the world for Chopin.
 * Friedrich Nietzsche, 29th December 1888 r., a letter to Meta von Salis, http://www.kurtiak-ley.pl/nietzche-dziela/


 * I am thankful to heavens that in all my instincts I stood Polish.
 * Friedrich Nietzsche, http://pasochicago.org/indexBanasik.html


 * You can conquer the Poles not by a threat but by heart
 * Stefan Wyszyński, 26 September 1982, http://www.dobre-nowiny.pl/4122.html

Quotes about Poland, from Polish Wikipedia
"Wielka mnogość religii, które się w nich roją, zwłaszcza w Polsce, o której mówią przysłowiowo, że jeżeli ktoś utracił swoją religię, to niechaj jej poszukuje w Polsce, a znajdzie ją z pewnością. Jeżli nie, to będzie mógł uznać, że zniknęła ze świata" Sir Edward Sandys

„państwa bez stosów” Janusz Tazbir

Jan Mączyński „przeciw szlachcie ani duchowieństwo, ani sam król nie był w stanie nic postanowić”

„pokój między sobą czynią, krwie dla różnej wiary i odmiany w kościołach nie przelewać... jako po inszych królestwach jaśnie widzimy” konfederacja warszawska 28 stycznia 1573

Stanisław Witkowski Polska jest „pewną ucieczką wszem narodom”, albowiem „gdy tu kto skłonił, każdego skrzydły swymi ten orzeł zasłonił”

„azyl heretyków”

Zygmunt Krasiński: „Że wojen u nas religijnych nie było, to tylko dowód, że nikt w nic nie wierzył mocno. O to, w co ludzie wierzą, biją się. Wojna jest znakiem życia. Naród polski bywał zawsze leniwy do wojny, do pospolitego ruszenia”

Tadeusz Boy Żeleński: Polsce jako „kraju, który umiał przetłumaczyć renesans na treny po Urszulce, rewolucję francuską na 3 maj, a samego Byrona na miłość ojczyzny”

Słowa pochwały dla polskiej tolerancji dochodziły z wielu krajów Europy. Niemieccy antytrynitarze nawoływali do osiedlenia się w Polsce swoich rodaków pragnących wolności sumienia. W roku 1607 Walenty Szmak zwracając się do Polaków pisał „Ludzie rozmaitego narodu, wygnańce z ojczyzn swoich nie dla żadnej złości, tylko dla samej prawdy i sumienia swego u was gospodę mieli i mają”.7 Inny zaś wybitny pisarz ariański, Marcin Ruar, przyznawał iż przybył do Polski „z powodu złotej wolności sumienia, umocnionej konfederacjami stanów królestwa i uroczystymi przysięgami królów”. Francuzi podobnie Niemcy również nie mogli się nadziwić panującej w naszym kraju tolerancji. Wszyscy zgodnie podkreślali iż mieszkańcy Rzeczypospolitej „mimo różnic religijnych żyją w pokoju”. Z kolei w angielskim czasopiśmie „News from Poland” (London 1642), czytamy, iż Wilno zamieszkują przedstawiciele kilku religii, a mimo to bez trudów wykonują swe praktyki religijne, wszyscy żyją w zgodzie i pokrewieństwie. To co powiedziałem świadczy o tym, że szeroka tolerancja wyznaniowa, o czym mówił Aleksander Brucker rozsławiła nasz kraj bardziej niż zwycięstwa militarne czy unia lubelska.

„News from Poland” (London 1642)-pismo angielskie

Rzym i Genewa potępiały nasz kraj, ponieważ nie podobały im się nasze stosunki wyznaniowe. Zarówno kalwini francuscy, jak angielscy katolicy stawiali ją za wzór swoim władcom. Przykład Polski świadczył ich zdaniem, że państwo nie słabnie przez to, iż „rządzone jest przez ludzi różnych religii, a główne urzędy są im rozdawane bez różnicy”. Mimo iż Polska tolerancja napotkała wiele oporów to jednak miała znacznie więcej sprzymierzeńców niż wrogów, czuła się w miarę bezpieczna.

Kazimierz Wielki, po przyłączeniu grodów czerwieńskich z ludnością ruską. Za politykę tolerancji spotkała go zresztą klątwa papieska

Paweł Włodkowic opowiadających się wyraźnie przeciw nawracaniu niechrześcijan siłą

Bernardo Bonifacio d`Oria, pragnąc zachęcić głośnego szermierza tolerancji Sebastiana Castelliona do osiedlenia się w tym kraju, pisał do niego tak: „Wielką, a nawet bardzo wielką miałbyś tu wolność życia według swych poglądów i zasad, jak również wolność pisania i wydawania. Nikt nie byłby cenzorem. Znalazłbyś tu ludzi, którzy by ochraniali Cię i bronili i -co powinno być Ci szczególnie miłe -związanych z tobą wspólną sprawą

Zresztą poziom i wymiar wiedzy serwowanej przez Jagiellonkę zmieniał się chyba na gorsze właśnie z powodu wydziału teologicznego i bezpośrednio z powodu… unii z Litwą, kiedy to potrzeba kształcenia i wysyłania na świeżo ochrzczoną Litwę księży zaważyło na losach nauki polskiej, której potencjał był właśnie na tym polu absorbowany.

Jezuici: "ten znajduje schronienie w Polsce i wszystko mu tu wolno bezkarnie."

Jan Mosdorf przed wojną okrzyczany jednym z największych antysemitów polskich, a który został rozstrzelany za pomoc Żydom).

Należałoby zapytać skąd więc tak dużo tych "niezależnych autorytetów" wmawia światu, a przede wszystkim Polakom, że są nietolerancyjnymi ciemniakami, szowinistami, ksenofobami itp. Sprawa wydaje się w tym wypadku bardzo prosta, jest to stary system wykorzystywany przez złodziei - ukraść i krzyczeć: "Łapać złodzieja!" Przypatrzmy się dlaczego domagają się tolerancji i jak ją rozumieją nasze "niezależne elity".

The country used to be a superpower from 15th century Jagiellon Poland to mid-17th century, when in 1648 the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was ravaged by the Khmelnytsky Uprising (1648–1654) and The Deluge (1648–1667) which started at the same year. During the wars the Commonwealth lost an estimated one-third of its population (relatively higher losses than during World War II) as well as its status as a great power.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth formed in terms of territory the largest state in Europe, discounting the fragmented, fractious non-state the Holy Roman Empire. The Commonwealth had a feared army and a large industrious population, giving it a solid claim to status as a great power or superpower.

Poland was a notable exception, which served as a haven for European Jewry 80-90 percent of the world’s Jews lived in Poland. Poland, which had been uniquely tolerant and ethnically as well as religiously diverse, officially confirmed its status as "a place of shelter for "heretics" " in the Confederation of Warsaw of 1573 the first toleration act in Europe.

Tag for alphabetizing?
Is there a way to add a tag encourage organizing the quotes on the page alphabetically by last name? - A23423413 (talk) 15:53, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

Surplus



 * Poland was the driver to what was to happen in Eastern Europe in 1989, first in Hungary, then in East Germany, and then elsewhere. Despite the suppression of Solidarity in 1981, Poland after 1956 was a relative island of freedom in Eastern Europe and, indirectly, was the inspiration for what would happen by the late 1980s. The weakness of the Eastern European regimes was demonstrated anew in Poland, both by the activities of underground Solidarity and by the serious strikes that began in April 1988. The government had grudgingly sought to widen its support by negotiating with other elements, but it wished to exclude Solidarity. The Catholic Church, however, refused to create a co-operative Christian labour movement as the government wanted, preferring to leave the more intransigent Solidarity as the key body for negotiations. The Communists were opposed to trade union pluralism, but, as a sign of movement on the government’s part, the amnesty of 1986 had freed political prisoners. The 1988 strikes discouraged the Party leadership and demonstrated its failure to find a solution to Poland’s problems. Combined with Gorbachev’s renunciation of intervention on behalf of Communism, this failure encouraged the leadership to move toward yielding its monopoly of power.
 * Jeremy Black, The Cold War: A Military History (2015)


 * On 30 November 1988, there was a televised debate between Lech Walesa and Alfred Miodowicz, the head of the official trade union federation and a member of the Politburo. This was a highly significant step as the television served as a means of controlling the dissemination of opinion. On 6 February 1989, Round Table talks between government and the technically illegal opposition began, with the Church, an institution of great prestige in Poland, playing an important mediatory role. Under an agreement, signed on 5 April 1989, reached against a background of widespread strikes, elections were held in Poland on 4 June. Only 35 per cent of the seats in the lower house, the Sejm, were awarded on the basis of the free vote, the remainder going to the Communists and their allies, but all of these seats were won by Solidarity. This expression of the public will was a dramatic blow to the old order. Communist cohesion collapsed, not least with the Communist Party being abandoned by its hitherto pliant allies. Strikes and other protests meanwhile continued. The new government was headed by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a member of Solidarity and a Catholic intellectual. He became the first non-Communist Prime Minister behind the Iron Curtain. There was, however, to be a major division between those who endorsed the ‘Round Table’ political settlement of 1989 as a way to avoid bloodshed, and those who criticised it as, allegedly, a compromise providing subsequent cover for ex-Communists to pillage the state.
 * Jeremy Black, The Cold War: A Military History (2015)


 * Because Poles would never elect a pro-Soviet government, Stalin imposed one—the cost, though, was a permanently resentful Poland, as well as a growing sense among his American and British allies that they could no longer trust him.
 * John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (2006), p. 22


 * [Political scientist Vsevolod] Bederson points out that in communist Poland, the regime controlled the top echelons of the systemic opposition parties but that below that level there were many members of those groups who were far more opposed to the regime than their party bosses and thus ready to mediate between the old regime and the forces of a new democracy.
 * , "Russia’s Systemic Opposition Parties Could Play Key Mediating Role in Post-Putin Transition, Bederson Says", Window on Eurasia (April 24, 2024)


 * The European Union and many of its countries, which used to take initiatives in the United Nations for peaceful settlements of conflict, are now one of the most important war assets of the U.S./NATO front. Many countries have also been drawn into complicity in breaking international law through U.S./U.K./NATO wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and so on. It is for this reason that I believe NATO should be abolished and that steps be taken towards disarmament through non-violent action and civil resistance. The means of resistance are very important. Our message that armed groups, militarism and war do not solve our problems but aggravate them challenges us to use new ways and that is why we need to teach the science of peace at every level of society.
 * Mairead Maguire in The Disturbing Expansion of the Military-Industrial Complex, Common Dreams, (14 October 2014)


 * I would like those Poles to come back. I would welcome all Polish people who went abroad. If only they could come back, it would be a great day for Poland.
 * The deputy Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, says he would like to see Poles in the UK go back to Poland, quoted on BBC News, 'Come back to Poland' says deputy prime minister, March 17, 2016.


 * Poland has been lobbying hard for a greater US military presence in the country ... as part of NATO operations, with the suggestion that a permanent base be created – for which Poland has offered to pay – dubbed "Fort Trump”, doubtless as a way of appealing to the current US president’s ego.
 * 'New NATO storage facility in Poland: first steps towards US base? Poland Daily''  (25 March 2019)


 * NATO has confirmed that it plans to establish a storage facility in Poland for U.S. military equipment, including armored vehicles, ammunition, and weapons to arm a full brigade. A NATO official on March 23 told AFP that a report earlier by The Wall Street Journal that said the $260 million facility would be located in Powidz, some 200 kilometers west of Warsaw, was accurate.  The WSJ quoted NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg as saying work on the site will begin this summer and take two years to complete.  Since Russia’s annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014, Poland, the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as well as other Eastern European states have expressed concerns about their security. The United States has deployed and rotated troops in the region since the Ukraine crisis began in an effort to deter Russia. NATO has also increased its presence near Russia’s borders.  Stoltenberg told the WSJ that the storage facility would help "underpin the increased U.S. presence in Poland."
 * NATO Confirms Plans For $260 Million U.S. Storage Site In Poland, Radio Free Europe, (14 March 2019)


 * Around the same time, communism in Central and Eastern Europe finally fell, but its economic rivalry with capitalism had, of course, long since been decided. It’s easy to think that these countries were never close to the market economies, but in 1950 countries such as the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary had a GDP per capita about a quarter higher than poor Western countries such as Spain, Portugal and Greece. In 1989, the eastern states were nowhere close. The eastern part of Germany was richer than West Germany before World War II. When the Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989, East Germany’s GDP per capita was not even half that of West Germany’s. Of these countries, those that liberalized the most have on average developed the fastest and established the strongest democracies. An analysis of twenty-six post-communist countries showed that a 10 per cent increase in economic freedom was associated with a 2.7 per cent faster annual growth. Political and economic institutions have improved the most in the Central and Eastern European countries that are now members of the EU, not least the Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Today, they are some of the freest countries in the world and have more than tripled average incomes since independence. But one can also observe a recent reformer like Georgia. It was seen as an economic basket case, but after the Rose Revolution in 2003 it increased per capita incomes almost threefold and cut extreme poverty rates by almost two-thirds.
 * Johan Norberg, The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World (2023)


 * To my mind, imperialism is something very simple and clear and it exists as a fact when one country, a large country, seizes a certain strip of territory and subjects to its laws a certain number of men and women against their will. Soviet policy after the beginning of the second world war was precisely this. There is no difficulty in pointing this out, but the difficulty lies in the fact that when one quotes from memory one will forget one or other argument. Because the Russians, thanks to the second world war, have quite simply annexed the three Baltic States, taken a piece of Finland, a piece of Rumania, a piece of Poland, a piece of Germany and, thanks to a well thought-out policy composed of internal subversion and external pressure, have established Governments justifiably styled as Satellites, in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Sofia, Bucharest, Tirana and East Berlin - I except Belgrade where the regime is unique thanks to the energy and courage of Marshal Tito. If all this does not constitute manifestations of imperialism, if all this is not the result of a policy consciously willed and consciously pursued, an imperialist aim, then indeed we shall have to start to go back to a new discussion and a new definition of words.
 * Paul-Henri Spaak, "The Atlantic Alliance and its Future," 14 September 1957


 * There was a thousand-year-old tradition in Poland that I feel far closer to than the religious traditions based on Torah and Talmud and halakha. Now much of that tradition is religious. But it represents my history, my Polish Jewish ancestors. Poland is the center of my Jewish cultural roots, and the destruction of that center in Eastern Europe has created the deprivation of my life. My mission is to try to figure out how to continue here.
 * Irena Klepfisz Interview (1997) in Meaning and Memory: Interviews with Fourteen Jewish Poets by Gary Pacernick (2001)


 * When the Jews finally staged the uprising in April 1943, the Polish underground refused them almost every form of assistance. Even though they were facing the same enemy, even though their country was occupied, the Poles could not overcome their anti-Semitism and join the Jews in the struggle for the freedom of both groups, and instead chose to stage a separate Polish uprising more than a year later.
 * Irena Klepfisz "Anti-Semitism in the Lesbian/Feminist Movement" (1981) in Dreams of an Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches and Diatribes (1990)


 * For two centuries, Poland suffered constant and brutal attacks. But while Poland could be invaded and occupied, and its borders even erased from the map, it could never be erased from history or from your hearts. In those dark days, you have lost your land, but you never lost your pride. So it is with true admiration that I can say today, that from the farms and villages of your countryside to the cathedrals and squares of your great cities, Poland lives, Poland prospers, and Poland prevails. Despite every effort to transform you, oppress you, or destroy you, you endured and overcame. You are the proud nation of Copernicus—think of that—Chopin, Saint John Paul II. Poland is a land of great heroes. And you are a people who know the true value of what you defend. The triumph of the Polish spirit over centuries of hardship gives us all hope for a future in which good conquers evil and peace achieves victory over war. For Americans, Poland has been a symbol of hope since the beginning of our Nation. Polish heroes and American patriots fought side by side in our War of Independence and in many wars that followed. Our soldiers still serve together today in Afghanistan and Iraq, combating the enemies of all civilization.
 * Donald Trump, Remarks in Warsaw, Poland; 6 July 2017 -- trimmed; full quote probably belongs elsewhere Ficaia (talk) 04:52, 17 June 2024 (UTC)


 * These contests happened throughout Europe, but it could still be argued that the Cold War began in Poland. There, Stalin’s policy of imposing strict Soviet control clashed with the wishes of his allies and those of the great majority of Poles. Britain had gone to war with Germany over the fate of Poland in 1939, and it would be hard for any British government to accept Soviet occupation and dictatorship in that country. Churchill was led by the exigencies of war and a great deal of wishful thinking about Stalin’s intentions to accept the Soviet plan for a reorganization of the Polish government over the heads of the Poles themselves. But this was only a first step in the Soviet campaign to bring Poland to heel. When the Poles had rebelled against the Germans in Warsaw in the summer of 1944, the Red Army deliberately stopped its offensive outside the Polish capital, allowing the Nazis to destroy the Polish Home Army. Stalin reckoned that the fewer Polish officers alive, the better for Soviet control of the country. When the Red Army was finally ordered to take Warsaw, a quarter of a million Poles had already been killed by the Wehrmacht and the SS and most of the city had been razed to the ground. Even so, after entering the Polish capital, Stalin’s secret police kidnapped many of the surviving leaders of the resistance and shipped them off to Moscow for a typical Stalinist show trial. Stalin had instructed the Soviet judges to give them “light” sentences, as a favor to his great power allies. All but a few were to die in captivity anyway.
 * Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (2017)


 * Poland, a major center of Yiddish culture and literature before the Second World War
 * Ruth Whitman and Robert Szulkin Introduction to An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Poetry


 * The French writer, Albert Camus, once lamented that "man eventually becomes accustomed to everything". I have always believed that this is an unjustly pessimistic view of our human condition; and in recent weeks I have seen enough to convince me that Camus, on this point at least, was wrong: 30,000 East Germans abandoning home, friends, jobs, everything, to escape to a new life of opportunity but also uncertainty in the West; thousands of Soviet miners striking not for more pay, but for better supplies; the joy of Poles as they greet their first non-Communist Prime Minister in 40 years; over a million inhabitants of the Baltic states forming a human chain to protest against the forced annexation of their nations; demonstrators in Prague braving the security forces to mark the 21st anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion; or in Leipzig calling for freedom of speech. Clearly the peoples of the East have not become accustomed to their lot. Totalitarian rule has not made people less attracted by freedom, democracy and self-determination. The opposite is true. Nor has it made them incapable of exercising these values through political organization and self-expression: look at the debates in the new Congress of the People's Deputies, the activities of the popular fronts, Solidarity in Poland or the opposition parties in Hungary. The demand for pluralism and reform can now be heard in every Eastern nation.
 * Manfred Wörner, Address given at the 35th Annual Session of the North Atlantic Assembly, 9 October 1989


 * Poland is a country that has been victimized by Nazism, by Communism. The world’s greatest crimes, the Holocaust, have occurred here.
 * Mark Brzezinski Ambassador Mark Brzezinski’s Interview with CNN (9 April 2022)


 * Poles cherish a heroic image of themselves, unshared by and little known in the outside world. One of their self-glorifying images is that of the defiant Pole. According to the Polish version of history, the Czechs allowed German occupation and the Poles resisted. The Czechs accepted communism in 1948 and the Poles resisted. The Poles rebelled in 1956 and supported the uprising in Budapest, while the Czechs said nothing and remained loyal to Moscow. Poles recall the fact that they sent a food shipment to support the Hungarian rebels, but the trucks had to pass through Czechoslovakia, where they were stopped. In the complicated pecking order of central Europe’s national images, Poles say that in 1956 “the Hungarians acted like Poles, the Poles like Czechs, and the Czechs acted like pigs.” Now the Czechs, whom the Poles had sneered at under Novotny’s Stalinist anachronism, were becoming the vanguard communist nation, the one to be followed. “It was surprising to see the Czechs ahead of us. They were supposed to be the opportunists and cowards,” said Eugeniusz Smolar.
 * Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World (2004), pp. 125-126, ISBN 0-345-45581-9

Source needed

 * Wielka mnogość religii, które się w nich roją, zwłaszcza w Polsce, o której mówią przysłowiowo, że jeżeli ktoś utracił swoją religię, to niechaj jej poszukuje w Polsce, a znajdzie ją z pewnością. Jeśli nie, to będzie mógł uznać, że zniknęła ze świata.
 * Great wealth of religions existing, especially in Poland, about which they say that if someone has lost religion, let them search it in Poland and they will find it there, surely. If not, they are to think that the religion disappeared from the face of the Earth.
 * Sir Edward Sandys