Ukraine Quotes

“Peace is not so much a political mandate as it is a shared state of consciousness that remains elevated and intact only to the degree that those who value it volunteer their existence as living examples of the same... Peace ends with the unraveling of individual hope and the emergence of the will to worship violence as a healer of private and social dis-ease.”
― Aberjhani, The American Poet Who Went Home Again

“Єсть на світі доля,
А хто її знає?
Єсть на світі воля,
А хто її має?
Єсть люде на світі —
Сріблом-злотом сяють,
Здається, панують,
А долі не знають,—
Ні долі, ні волі!
З нудьгою та з горем
Жупан надівають,
А плакати — сором.
Возьміть срібло-злото
Та будьте багаті,
А я візьму сльози —
Лихо виливати;
Затоплю недолю
Дрібними сльозами,
Затопчу неволю
Босими ногами!
Тоді я веселий,
Тоді я багатий,
Як буде серденько
По волі гуляти!”
― Taras Shevchenko, Кобзар

“Як умру, то поховайте
Мене на могилі,
Серед степу широкого,
На Вкраїні милій,
Щоб лани широкополі,
І Дніпро, і кручі
Було видно, було чути,
Як реве ревучий.
Як понесе з України
У синєє море
Кров ворожу... отойді я
І лани, і гори —
Все покину і полину
До самого Бога
Молитися... а до того
Я не знаю Бога.
Поховайте та вставайте,
Кайдани порвіте
І вражою злою кров’ю
Волю окропіте.
І мене в сем’ї великій,
В сем’ї вольній, новій,
Не забудьте пом’янути
Незлим тихим словом.”
― Taras Shevchenko, Кобзар

“That there is in this world neither brains, nor goodness, nor good sense, but only brute force. Bloodshed. Starvation. Death. That there was not the slightest hope not even a glimmer of hope, of justice being done. It would never happen. No one would ever do it. The world was just one big Babi Yar. And there two great forces had come up against each other and were striking against each other like hammer and anvil, and the wretched people were in between, with no way out; each individual wanted only to live and not be maltreated, to have something to eat, and yet they howled and screamed and in their fear they were grabbing at each other’s throats, while I, little blob of watery jelly, was sitting in the midst of this dark world. Why? What for? Who had done it all? There was nothing, after all, to hope for! Winter. Night.”
― A. Anatoli (Anatoly Vasilievich Kuznetsov), Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel

“Europeans the Poles or Balts coming in here … we brought here knowledge with us and our culture with us, but we assimilated … assimilated is not one way, it’s a two-way street. - Fred Ritzkowski, German”
― Peter Brune, Suffering, Redemption and Triumph: The first wave of post-war Australian immigrants 1945-66

“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might say—about that 'other' cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to atoms between the upper and nether millstones of Hitlerism and Stalinism. One of the most objective chroniclers is Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. In his view, it is still 'Operation Reinhardt,' or the planned destruction of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, 'roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.' We should not at all allow ourselves to forget the millions of non-Jewish citizens of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slav territories who were also massacred. But for me the salient fact remains that anti-Semitism was the regnant, essential, organizing principle of all the other National Socialist race theories. It is thus not to be thought of as just one prejudice among many.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Political calculation and local suffering do not entirely explain the participation in these pogroms. Violence against Jews served to bring the Germans and elements of the local non-Jewish populations closer together. Anger was directed, as the Germans wished, toward the Jews, rather than against collaborators with the Soviet regime as such. People who reacted to the Germans' urging knew that they were pleasing their new masters, whether or not they believed that the Jews were responsible for their own woes. By their actions they were confirming the Nazi worldview. The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions confirmed the Nazi understanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state. Violence against Jews also allowed local Estonians, Latvian, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles who had themselves cooperated with the Soviet regime to escape any such taint. The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well.
Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities. The pogroms took place where the Soviets had recently arrived and where Soviet power was recently installed, where for the previous months Soviet organs of coercion had organized arrests, executions, and deportations. They were a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text.

P. 196”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“Появилась даже такая шутка: Украина — это страна, где люди говорят по-русски, а Россия — это страна, где люди молчат по-русски [141].”
― Timothy Snyder, Украинская история, российская политика, европейское будущее

“For the reporters, the heroes of our time”
― Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

“Communication among citizens depends upon equality. At the same time, equality cannot be achieved without facts.”
― Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

“the problem with accepting things that are contradictory as possibly right is that you cannot possibly be thinking yourself when you do it.”
― Timothy Snyder

“So many millions of men and women, from high-ranking officials to regular folks like us, making the moral choice of not giving in to the dark—but doing what was right, no matter what.”
― Illia Ponomarenko, I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv

“I think the future of Ukraine is female Ukrainians mating with Western European and USA males, as they will be there in significant numbers in the future during the recovery phase of the war. It will likely become a predominantly mixed race country.”
― Steven Magee

“Завтра все буде інакше, завтра все буде, як завжди, буде, як раніше: розмірені дні, вдома, де кожен займається своїм, де все на своїх місцях, де немає нічого зайвого й непотрібного. Ранки, наповнені хатніми клопотами, робота, до якої звикаєш, як до одягу: не тисне, не заважає, носиться, доки носиться. Тихі вечори, темні ночі. Стільки в усьому цьому, виявляється, втіхи, стільки тепла. Варто було потрапити сюди, в середину пекла, аби відчути, як багато ти мав і як багато втратив.”
― Сергій Жадан, Інтернат

“Хлопці, а в чому різниця між католиками, православними чи протестантами?", а я кажу: "В нас Бог один, а провайдери різні".”
― Мирослав Лаюк, Бахмут

“Хлопці питають, коли я опублікую цей матеріал. Відповідаю: мабуть, у травні. І один з Андріїв, перед тим як розвернутися в бік авто з іншими бійцями, на прощання каже:
- Думаю, мене вже не буде в травні.”
― Мирослав Лаюк, Бахмут

“Vast rivers, the kind that flow through continents and look like seas at their widest points, hold a particular fascination for me, as do trains. The reason is simple: we don't have these things in Shetland, and I hope the childlike awe I feel on a riverbank, or watching an intercity train swoosh across a high bridge, will never fade. Best, of course, when the two are combined.

About a hundred miles southwest of Kharkiv the train had slowed, and I watched from the window, totally transfixed, as we clunked across a bridge that seemed to stretch on and on over the dark river. Lights glimmered, reassuring, in the distance. There are many bridges which knit the city of Dnipro together, taking trains and traffic across both the Dnipro and Samara rivers. The city sprawls at their confluence.”
― Jen Stout, Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia's War

“In early Soviet times, when Kharkiv was the capital of the Ukranian Soviet Socialist Republic, Moscow's policy of korenizatsiia - 'nativisation' - prompted a brief flourishing of a Ukrainian avant-garde, paywrights and poets and journalists attracted to this bustling city of industrial and trading fame, allowed to write in their own language at last. The policy was the Bolsheviks' attempt to endear this restive republic, and the others, to their rule. In this political environment, writers were elevated.

This special treatment came, however, came with the heavy caveat of state control which was followed by repression - a story familiar across the Soviet Union. But in Kharkiv the axe fell quicker.

Stalin grew tired of korenizatsiia and opted to wipe out the native intelligentsia instead. In the early 1930s, the party line shifted abruptly; Ukrainian 'bourgeois nationalism' was the new enemy. The purges began. The Soviet Union under Stalin's paranoid control regressed to Tsarist ways. Russification and centralisation, brutal orders issued by Moscow and carried out by its secret police.”
― Jen Stout, Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia's War

“Тут можна стати богом ненавмисне.
А вже опришком, так і поготів.”
― Ліна Костенко

“I have a writer's imagination, so I would just imagine the horrors happening anyway. It's like when something happens to someone you love and you imagine them in hospital, but when you get there you see that this person is hurt but they'e alive, and it's easier. Well, it's the same with the cities and villages.”
― Victoria Amelina

“There exists in this war a strange calculation, which obeys no clear logic, that devalues everyday life to the point of negation. In the eyes of those who order an attack on a peaceful city, life in this place has already ceased to exist long before the strike.”
― Yevgenia Belorusets, War Diary

“Не вдержався на Україні московський цар з тисячами жандармів не вдержиться і московська комуна з чекістами та комісарами.”
― Ярослав Файзулін, Історія.UA: постаті, факти, версії

“Не вдержався на Україні московський цар з тисячами жандармів, не вдержиться і московська комуна з чекістами та комісарами.”
― Ярослав Файзулін, Історія.UA: постаті, факти, версії

“Тільки не від кого незалежна самостійна Україна забезпечить Ваші права і інтереси.
Геть московську неволю!
Геть комісарів московських!
Хай живе Українська Народна Республіка!
Вся влада українському народові!”
― Ярослав Файзулін, Історія.UA: постаті, факти, версії

“The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean, of Ukraine.”
― George W. Bush

“It should by now be clear to Americans that any Power, whether Napoleonic France or Hitlerian Germany or some other madly ambitious power of the future, which goes on the warpath in Europe and attempts to dominate that Continent, automatically endangers the peace and security of the rest of the world and is sure, sooner or later, to involve the United States in a horribly costly overseas conflict.”
― Carlton J.H. Hayes, Wartime Mission In Spain 1942-1945

“Зупинити”
― Steven Magee

“I have been watching the Democrats run the USA for four years. The police are still corrupt and incompetent, their ‘green’ energy policy is toxic, workplace health and safety enforcement through OSHA is a ‘ghost’, Boeing is a global embarrassment, millions of people are being denied their eligible disability benefits through feeble excuses, mental illness is a national crisis, cities have filled up with the homeless, housing is out of reach to the masses, rents have gone astronomical, their proxy wars have us on the edge of the next nuclear disaster, their unemployment numbers are fraudulent because they do not count the long term unemployed or the disabled, unemployment benefits are cut off to the long term unemployed, illegal immigration went crazy during their term, and so on. I will be using my 2024 USA vote for positive change and that will not be coming from another four years of the Democrats.”
― Steven Magee

“I will be using my 2024 USA vote for positive change and that will not be coming from another four years of the Democrats!”
― Steven Magee

“The border between Russia and Ukraine is not a redundancy or a formality, but an essential need for our survival. It seems that we are all doomed to constantly make mistakes about where our home, the safe space of trust, ends and which of its borders should be especially well-guarded.”
― Victoria Amelina