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" It is important to remember that John Paul II was not an American or a Frenchman. "

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" The E.U. is an organization that was created after the Second World War for calming down the nationalism of member states, and it did so very successfully. "

" One of the problems in the Ukrainian crisis is that very few Westerners know their history, or if they know it, what they learn is what we call the Russian version of history. "

" Our mental maps are distorted by who are the 'winners' of history and who are the powers of today. "

" Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied. "

" I wanted to produce a book that would demonstrate not only the rich diversity of people who answered to Anders's command but also the extraordinary variety of their experiences and emotions: from death to despair, fear and longings and eventually to hope. "

" I always needle a bit when people say I'm a champion of the Poles, because I've always had a very multinational view of Poland. "

" Europe's fragmentation puts the wider historical picture beyond reach. "

" In the 21st century, there will probably be a reflex against the disintegration of traditional European culture. What started as a reaction will come full circle, and there will be a return to the roots. "

" Serenity is the balance between good and bad, life and death, horrors and pleasures. Life is, as it were, defined by death. If there wasn't death of things, then there wouldn't be any life to celebrate. "

" I first heard of General Anders and his army more than 50 years ago. I admired him then, and I admire him still; and I feel a special bond with the men, women and children whom he rescued from hunger, disease, and official abuse. Theirs is a story of endurance and fortitude that gives one faith in the human spirit. "

" Transience is one of the fundamental characteristics both of the human condition and of the political order. "

" The Black Sea is Eastern Europe's counterpart to the Mediterranean. "

" Nearly all interested parties think I write too shortly on the subjects that interest them most. "

" At the end of the Roman Empire, in the Byzantine period, the empire shrinks and shrinks until it consists of one city, Constantinople, and the Ottoman Turks can encircle it. "

" In 1945, when the Second World War technically ends in Poland, the incoming Soviet army liberates some groups of people but begins to oppress the general population, in some ways more harshly than it had happened before. "

" The last years of fading communism provided an ideal environment for Poland's Catholic Church, which acted as an umbrella for dissenters of all sorts. "

" The United Kingdom is not, and never has been, a nation state. "

" The shores of the Black Sea lend themselves to the literary genre that may be classified as 'cultural pilgrimage,' which is not just a higher form of travel writing but which has the further mission of reporting on present conditions and supplying neglected knowledge. "

" Bulgaria was the only Axis country to deflect insistent German demands for the deportation of its Jews. "

" Nowadays, it is no longer possible to maintain that the Nazi-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939 was a fiction invented by bourgeois-imperialist enemies. Everyone has seen the film clips of Herr Ribbentrop landing in Moscow, and of Stalin smiling broadly as Ribbentrop and Molotov signed up side by side. "

" People don't see very often their death coming... Look at the French Revolution: The king of France was thinking in the 1780s, 'We're doing rather better than my father in the 1770s.' "

" Poland was the racial laboratory of the Nazis. This is where they started to put their abhorrent theories into practice. "

" All political institutions will end sooner or later. The question is when and how. "

" Nothing stands still. Everything is moving in some direction or another. "

" History must give the Poles the principal credit for bringing the Soviet bloc to its knees. "

" It was in the 20th century that national sovereignty really ruled the roost, and the E.U. was formed to cure that. "

" States seem to have a natural life cycle, and anything can occur to change them into something else, and that something might be no bad thing. "

" Law and Justice are the most vindictive gang in Europe. "

" Traditionally, historians thought in terms of invasions: the Celts took over the islands, then the Romans, then the Anglo-Saxons. It now seems much more likely that the resident population doesn't change as much as thought. The people stay put but are reculturalized by some new dominant culture. "

" In essence, the tragedy of the Warsaw Rising resulted from a systemic breakdown of the Grand Alliance. "