Poland

"Kogo Pan Bóg stworzy, tego nie umorzy."

"Komu nie ma rady, temu nie ma pomocy."

"Kozła doić próżno."

"Ksiądz prałat tłumaczy, a żyje inaczej."

"Kto łaskę pańską szacuje, coś w sobie niepewnego czuje."

"Kto czeka, ten się doczeka."

"Kto dwa zające goni, żadnego nie złapie."

"Kto ma żytko, ma wszystko."

"Kto nie idzie naprzód, ten się cofa."

"Kto nie ma w głowie, musi mieć w nogach."

"Kto prawdę gada, wiele slow nie potrzebuje."

"Kto prawdzie dzwoni, taki na guz goni."

"Kto rano wstaje, temu Pan Bóg daje."

"Kto łaskę pańską szacuje, coś w sobie niepew nego czuje."

"Kogo Bóg chce skarać, wtedy mu rozum odejmie."

"Nie kupuj kota w worku."

"On May 28 of last year, President Obama stood next to Prime Minister of Poland in Warsaw and declared he would support new rules to help more Poles get tourist visas to the United States. “If you’ve lived in Chicago and you haven’t become a little bit Polish,” Mr. Obama joked, “there’s something wrong with you.”A year later, the president made himself the target of a searing denunciation by Mr. Tusk after he referred on Tuesday to a “Polish death camp,” instead of a Nazi death camp in Poland, in bestowing a Presidential Medal of Freedom on , a hero of the Polish resistance to the Germans during World War II. Mr. Obama was guilty of “ignorance, lack of knowledge, bad intentions,” Mr. Tusk said."

"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."

"I have issued the command – and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness – for the present only in the East – with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language."

"Ich habe den Befehl gegeben – und ich lasse jeden füsilieren, der auch nur ein Wort der Kritik äußert – daß das Kriegsziel nicht im Erreichen von bestimmten Linien, sondern in der physischen Vernichtung des Gegners besteht. So habe ich, einstweilen nur im Osten, meine Totenkopfverbände bereitgestellt mit dem Befehl, unbarmherzig und mitleidslos Mann, Weib und Kind polnischer Abstammung und Sprache in den Tod zu schicken."

"The Polish soldier is a marcher of extraordinary endurance."

"There are few virtues which the Poles do not possess and there are few errors they have ever avoided."

"Oh, how beautiful land is our Mazovia! There be clean water, and air fresher! Bigger Pine trees and girls prettier, People stronger and sky is brighter."

"Hey Pole, know resolute Mazovians; Ready for a fight. In war and in peace Beside their short height, Laughing, they can beat."

"Just from the capital of Masovia."

"Mazovia. Sand, Vistula and the forest. Mi Mazovia. Smooth, far away - under stems of humming stars, under the river of pine trees."

"If, traveller, the bell seems too big to you, tell me what work of Sigismund is small?"

"Ile przeżyć i wspomnień budzi w nas głos tego królewskiego dzwonu! Brzmi w tym uroczystym graniu modlitwa wieków o wolność i pomyślność Ojczyzny, a równocześnie jakieś wezwanie do uwalniania serc od wszystkiego, co jej może szkodzić, i do wznoszenia ducha ku tym wartościom, które nasze pokolenie przejęło ze wspaniałej tradycji ojców."

"Jak długo na Wawelu Brzmi Zygmuntowski dzwon; Jak długo z gór karpackich Rozbrzmiewa polski ton, Stać będzie kraj nasz cały, Stać będzie Piastów gród; Zwycięży Orzeł Biały, Zwycięży polski lud!"

"Dzwon królewski: Siedziałem u królewskich stóp, królewski za mną dwór: synaczek i kilka cór, Włoszka – a wielki chór kleru zawodził hymny; a dzwon wschodził. Patrzali wszyscy w górę, a dzwon wschodził – zawisnął u szczytów i z wyżyn się rozdzwonił..."

"Deo Opt Max ac Virgini Deiparae sanctisque patronis suis divus Sigismundus Poloniae Rex campanam hanc dignam animi operumque ac gestorum suorum magnitudine fieri fecit anno salutis MDXX"

"March, march, Dąbrowski, From Italy to Poland. Under your command We shall rejoin the nation."

"Like Czarniecki to Poznań After the Swedish annexation, To save our homeland, We shall return across the sea."

"We'll cross the Vistula, we'll cross the Warta, We shall be Polish. Bonaparte has given us the example Of how we should prevail."

"This homage has been rendered not to me – for the Polish soil is fertile and does not lack better writers than me – but to the Polish achievement, the Polish genius."

"It has been said that Poland is dead, exhausted, enslaved, but here is the proof of her life and triumph"

"Poland has been a source of trouble for over five hundred years."

"Well, from here I will go to Bonn and then Berlin, where there stands a grim symbol of power untamed. The Berlin Wall, that dreadful gray gash across the city, is in its third decade. It is the fitting signature of the regime that built it. And a few hundred kilometers behind the Berlin Wall, there is another symbol. In the center of Warsaw, there is a sign that notes the distances to two capitals. In one direction it points toward Moscow. In the other it points toward Brussels, headquarters of Western Europe's tangible unity. The marker says that the distances from Warsaw to Moscow and Warsaw to Brussels are equal. The sign makes this point: Poland is not East or West. Poland is at the center of European civilization. It has contributed mightily to that civilization. It is doing so today by being magnificently unreconciled to oppression. Poland's struggle to be Poland and to secure the basic rights we often take for granted demonstrates why we dare not take those rights for granted. Gladstone, defending the Reform Bill of 1866, declared, ``You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side. It was easier to believe in the march of democracy in Gladstone's day -- in that high noon of Victorian optimism."

"We shall soon have the scenes of the Polish Diets and elections re-acted here, and in not many years the fate of Poland may be that of United America."

"A great nation, only the people are cunts."

"Żeby Polska była Polską."

"Cultivation, old civilization, beauty, history! Surprising turnings of streets, shapes of venerable cottages, lovely aged eaves, unexpected and gossamer turrets, steeples, the gloss, the antiquity! Gardens. Whoever speaks of Paris has never seen Warsaw. [...] Whoever yearns for an aristocratic sensibility, let him switch on the great light of Warsaw."

"And Poland at last proclaimed: "Whoever he be that comes to me, he shall be free and equal, because I am freedom.""

"Forbid it, England—by thine own great self, By thine own yet unviolated hearths, . . . . Let not thy minister go forth in vain: The fate of Poland now is at thy will; The Autocrat will hear and heed thy voice; England, my glorious country, speak, and save!"

"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."

"But we cannot be blamed for not taking seriously people who, unable though they are to remember correctly any single fact from our history or to say which barbaric dialect we speak, are perfectly able instead to teach us how liberated we are in the East."

"Poland is an economic impossibility with no industry but Jew-baiting."

"Quant à l'action qui va commencer, elle se passe en Pologne, c’est-à-dire nulle part."

"Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be Teuton. Kings lose their pains and their honor in the attempt to make them so. Sooner or later, the submerged part floats to the surface and reappears. Greece becomes Greece again, Italy is once more Italy. The protest of right against the deed persists forever. The theft of a nation cannot be allowed by prescription. These lofty deeds of rascality have no future. A nation cannot have its mark extracted like a pocket handkerchief."

"I have issued the command – and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness – for the present only in the East – with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language."