"The 1980s were a curious time — a time of realization that a new age was upon us. Now, from the perspective of our time, it is obvious that like the pieces of a global chain of events, Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and even Mikhail Gorbachev helped bring about this new age in Europe. We at Solidarity like to claim more than a little credit, too, for bringing about the end of the Cold War. In the Europe of the 1980s, Ronald Reagan presented the vision. For us in Central and Eastern Europe, that meant freedom from the Soviets. As I say repeatedly, we owe so much to all those who supported us. Perhaps in the early years, we didn’t express enough gratitude. We were so busy introducing all the necessary economic and political reforms in our reborn country. Yet President Ronald Reagan must have realized what remarkable changes he brought to Poland, and indeed the rest of the world. And I hope he felt gratified. He should have."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Presidents of the United StatesTelevision personalitiesActors from IllinoisRadio personalitiesAutobiographers from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Lech Wałęsa, former president of Poland, as quoted in "A Tribute to Ronald Reagan" (2004)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Related Quotes
"Well, from here I will go to Bonn and then Berlin, where there stands a grim symbol of power untamed. The Berlin Wall…"
"President Reagan is a man with a very special sense of religion. Reagan sees a proper role for government and a prope…"
"Reagan pulled together the Republican Party’s free-market optimists, ultraright libertarians, family-values moralists…"
"I don’t want to be controversial, but I do see that under Ronald Reagan and Bush’s administration there was a fantasy…"
"I would think to myself [...] that the battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War …"
"When Reagan was nominated in 1966 by the Republicans it marked a qualitative turn for the worse in California and nat…"
"What do you do when your President ignores all the palpable, relevant facts and wanders in circles?"
"[A] lapse into fiscal indiscipline on a scale never before experienced in peacetime."
"He [Reagan] demonstrated for all to see how far you can go in this life with a smile, a shoeshine and the nerve to pu…"
"President Reagan was the Churchill of his era. His commitment to the principles of freedom and democracy and his boun…"