"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."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Ronald Reagan, Speech to the British Parliament, 1982
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Poland
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Related Quotes
"President Reagan was the Churchill of his era. His commitment to the principles of freedom and democracy and his boun…"
"President Reagan is a man with a very special sense of religion. Reagan sees a proper role for government and a prope…"
"What do you do when your President ignores all the palpable, relevant facts and wanders in circles?"
"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…"
"Reagan pulled together the Republican Party’s free-market optimists, ultraright libertarians, family-values moralists…"
"[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 James K. Polk, who presided over the invasion of Mexico, saw its significance as an example of how a democr…"