Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My parents emigrated from Poland in 1924 with my brother, who was a few months old. They were from a simple family of Polish Jews. They were looking, I suppose, for a better economic life and were escaping from an anti-Semitic environment.
I'm a big supporter of the military simply because I'm the daughter of a Polish immigrant who fled Europe during World War II from Poland and lied about his age to join the Army simply because he was proud to be an American. And who isn't?
The Holocaust committed by the Nazis turned this country, where most of the European Jews used to live and where their culture used to flourish, into a massive grave. This is why initiatives to revive Jewish culture in Poland is so important.
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.
Poland was once a powerful imperial country that disappeared from maps of Europe for more than 100 years. It was partitioned and occupied by the Nazis and the Russians... We pop up and disappear and we do not trust what we are told to believe.
There were three causes that accounted for the proclamation of martial law in Poland. First it was the progressing economic ruin of the country. Second, it was the decomposition of the functioning of the state. And third, a threat of a civil war.
I was named after my Jewish grandfather who left Poland early in the 20th century. What I knew from an early age was that he had lived most of his life in England, his Jewish wife had died, and he married a non-Jewish woman who was my grandmother.
I created DonorsChoose by putting pencil to paper - literally - and sketching out each screen of the web site and how it would work. Then I paid a programmer from Poland $1,500 to turn my sketches and common-sense rules into a functioning website.
It is Trump who plays with the tax code to pay no taxes; it is Trump whose Trump-brand products are made overseas by cheap labor; it is Trump who hires undocumented workers from Poland to work on his projects, then refuses to pay them minimum wages.
We all live in a free Poland, and there would be no free Poland without you, Twenty-five years ago, I did not stand on the same side together with you, but today I have no doubts that it was your vision of Poland which led us in the right direction.
My grandparents were very well-educated people, but in the Jewish tradition. They knew everything about the Bible. And then they had to come to Brussels, to run away from Poland, because there was too much anti-Semitism. They lost everything they had.
History never repeats, but there are the obvious precedents that pessimists can reach for: Sarajevo, 1914; the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, 1938. But equally relevant might be the tragically meaningless guarantees Britain extended to Poland in 1939.
There is no official censorship in literature, but I feel a certain fear when I see that a kind of self-censorship is developing in Poland. Authors are somehow afraid of expressing what they really think or feel because they fear political consequences.
When I wrapped 'Falling Skies,' I took a trip to the Caribbean to visit my grandma, which is great. I was out there for two weeks in Grenada. Then after that, I went to Poland for two and a half weeks to go watch some of the European soccer championships.
Of course we have the right to have expectations towards Europe - especially towards the Europe that left us to be the prey of the Russians in 1945 - but above all we have the right to rule ourselves here on our own and decide what form Poland should have.
In Italy, my wife and I always said we feel like strangers because there's maybe only a couple other people from other parts of the world. Here in Chicago, there's millions of people from Poland, thousands from Japan, hundreds from Croatia. We like it here.
I grew up at the time of Social Realism in Poland, when everyone was supposed to be 'writing for the workers.' But I soon became allergic to this. I have never written for audiences. I like it if they appreciate my music. But I would never change my style for them.
I think - you know, the big trauma in my life, personally, was the fact that at 14, I was taken out of Poland unwittingly because my parents were divorced. Left the country - my mother left for England with her new husband. I wasn't even aware that she'd married him.
I remember one of my first international trips to Poland. After a long, tortuous journey, we arrived at the hotel exhausted but without the team management, who had gone ahead of us from the airport in cars, checked into the best rooms, and left us with what was left.
Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It's just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don't really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.
In Poland we still believe - and this certainly applies to my government - that greater competitiveness, and greater growth and savings are possible in an economy which is as sparely regulated as possible, where freedom, competition and private ownership are key values.
My country is in the grips of a major economic crisis. This is causing dramatic consequences for the very existence of Polish families. A permanent economic crisis in Poland may also have serious repercussions for Europe. Thus, Poland ought to be helped and deserves help.
You've got some very powerful countries: Poland, the United Kingdom, Sweden and others who have a genuine desire to see the euro zone straighten itself out. It's good for all of us, whether you're in the euro zone or not, to make sure that it doesn't lead to a fracturing.
At age 14, my paternal grandfather fled Poland to escape the pogroms that killed tens of thousands of European Jews. He worked full-time for a cobbler in Boston, making his way to California and eventually starting his own business in Taft - the Goldman Oil Supply Company.
As a Jew, even if you were not born in Poland, the very name, Poland, gives rise to a shuddering in your body and a longing in your heart. This country was the breeding ground for the soul of the Jewish nation, and unfortunately, also grounds to the largest Jewish cemetery.
If someone is undertaking aggressive military activities in Ukraine and Syria, if someone is bolstering his military presence near his neighbors... then we have an unequivocal answer regarding who wants to start a new Cold War. Certainly, it is not Poland or the NATO alliance.
When people are coming to Krakow and we show them how and where we practice, they are like, 'Seriously? Are you kidding me?' But we're always saying that what matters about the courts - the lines, the nets - are the same. I'm practicing in Poland even when I don't have good facilities.
But the fact is we did have colonies in the east of Poland, we did have a slave economy there. But this is not common knowledge - or part of our national myth. It goes against the current romanticised view of the government, and much of the country, that Poles have always been victims, never oppressors.
The E.U. cannot give up on common solidarity. The idea that every country does its own thing, and history and geography decides whose turn it is - whether Greece or Italy or Spain or, who knows, even Poland if there's a crisis in north-eastern Europe - that just can't be. There has to be a common policy.
Marie Curie is my hero. Few people have accomplished something so rare - changing science. And as hard as that is, she had to do it against the tide of the culture at the time - the prejudice against her as a foreigner, because she was born in Poland and worked in France. And the prejudice against her as a woman.
Even in Poland, where the president is far less powerful than the prime minister, people have a deeper and more atavistic relationship with the person who is a serious contender to become head of state. They want their national leader - the tribal chief - to look like them, to live like them, to reflect their values.
Poland is different from the other so-called socialist countries. We have a different background. Poland belongs to the West, not the East. We belong to the Mediterranean, Latin culture, not to the Byzantine, which is very different and which you find in Bulgaria and even parts of Czechoslovakia and, of course, Romania.
We need to have a national security that puts steel in front of our enemies. I would send weapons to Ukraine. I would work with NATO to put forces on the eastern border of Poland and the Baltic nations, and I would reinstate, put in place back in the missile defense system that we had in Poland and in the Czech Republic.
Concerning Poland, I can only say that the peoples of Central Europe and Hungary are a community in fate, to the death. Many of us would spill our blood for Poland any time. And vice versa: in an emergency, many Polish people would give his life to protect Hungarians. This has happened more than once over the course of history.
I have never found out that there was in my family an artist or anyone interested in the arts or sciences, and I have never been sufficiently interested in my 'family tree' to bother. My father and mother had come to America on one of those great waves of immigration that followed persecution and pogroms in Czarist Russia and Poland.
My father emigrated from Lithuania to the United States at the age of 12. He received his higher education in New York City and graduated in 1914 from the New York University School of Dentistry. My mother came at the age of 14 from a part of Russia which, after the war, became Poland; she was only 19 when she was married to my father.
All my mind was centered on my studies, which, especially at the beginning, were difficult. In fact, I was insufficiently prepared to follow the physical science course at the Sorbonne, for, despite all my efforts, I had not succeeded in acquiring in Poland a preparation as complete as that of the French students following the same course.
In Poland, the whole saying is, 'You've got one eye to Morocco and the other to the Caucasus.' That's the heart of the culture. In England, they say it less romantic: 'You've got a wandering eye.' The saying means my main stream in life must be Deep Purple. That's my main job. Then every now, and I can wander off and have one eye to Morocco.
You go to Paris, or you go to Portugal, you go to Poland, and you ask, 'Who are you people?' They'll tell you, we're Portuguese, we're Spanish, we're Polish. Who are the people that are really European? The people in Brussels, in the E.U. bureaucracy. Europe has not been able to move to the level of patriotic identification with the concept.
I was 16, I just wanted to do something in my life. I wanted to be healthy, I wanted to lose some weight and I went for my first training. In the beginning I didn't know what Muay Thai meant. You know? But I liked it so much, and after six months of training I had my first competition in Poland. I won, and after that I knew that I wanted to do it.
