Quotes & Sayings About Lithuania

The biggest misconception may be about my birth country, Lithuania, due to the lack of knowledge about it, but also probably because some strong lobbies work against European construction. There is a huge difference between what I hear from the French media, for example, and what I know about this country and its people. — Alante Kavaite

My grandparents all came from Lithuania to South Africa. — Antony Sher

To make his point, Ivan staged a sensational demonstration. Some time before Christmas he had arrested two Lithuanians employed in the Moscow Kremlin. He charged them with plotting to poison him. The accusations against Jan Lukhomski and Maciej the Pole did not sound very credible; but their guilt or innocence was hardly relevant. They were held in an open cage on the frozen Moskva River for all the world to see; and on the eve of the departure of Ivan's envoy to Lithuania, they were burned alive in their cage.50 As the ice melted under the fierce heat of the fire and the heavy iron cage sank beneath the water, taking its carbonized occupants down in a great hiss of steam, one could have well imagined that something was being said about Lithuania's political future. — Norman Davies

When my father was born, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. When I was born, it was Lithuania. When I left, it was Hungary. It is difficult to say where I come from. — Elie Wiesel

I myself saw the great works of Western civilization for the first time in my high school in Lithuania in bad black-and-white reproductions on miserable paper. That was, for many years, what art was for me. But from those miserable black-and-white reproductions, I got something, something unmistakable. — Jonas Mekas

For two years now, my office has had the honour and the privilege of sponsoring seminars on the functioning of government in this country for Eastern Europeans. These seminars and exchanges have brought together representatives from such nations as Bulgaria, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Republic, Roumania, Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Ukraine, all of them anxious to learn what makes a society as diverse as Canada work and how our institutions make it governable. — John Allen Fraser

American students, we are told, are falling behind in reading and math; on test after test, they score below most European students (at the level of Lithuania), and the solution, rather than seeking to engage their curiosity, has been testing and more testing - a dry and brittle method that produces lackluster results. And so resources are pulled from the "soft" fields that are not being tested. Music teachers are being fired or not replaced; art classes are quietly dropped from the curriculum; history is simplified and moralized, with little expectation that any facts will be learned or retained; and instead of reading short stories, poems and novels, students are invited to read train schedules and EPA reports whose jargon could put even the most committed environmentalist to sleep. — Azar Nafisi

How many people in the United States do you think will be willing to go to war to free Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania? — Franklin D. Roosevelt

She preferred silence. So I do not know her and yet I know her. She was ... (He touches the coffin) ... not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania - and how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted. — Tony Kushner

Another letter complained about the soldiers suffering in Stalingrad, asking God why He let things like this happen to the brave German people. This letter was a classic. The godless barbarians who had forgotten the image of God in the hour of their victories, the murderers who were shooting tens of thousands of Jews and Russian prisons of without blinking an eye, suddenly now remembered that there was a God somewhere after all. Where was God when they were massacring innocent women and children in the forts of Lithuania, piling them on top of the other in huge mass graves? Why didn't they look up to Him at that hour? But at that time they were playing God themselves, with the lives of millions of "subhumans." Oh, how good it felt to hear a German Nazi clamour of God! God! This was our revenge. God was no in Stalingrad. This was the Ninth Fort for the Germans. — William W. Mishell

Tadas was sent to the principal today," announced Jonas at dinner. He wedged a huge piece of sausage into his small mouth.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because he talked about hell," sputtered Jonas, juice from the plump sausage dribbling down his chin.
"Jonas, don't speak with your mouth full. Take smaller pieces," scolded Mother.
"Sorry," said Jonas with his moth stuffed. "It's good." He finished chewing. I took a bite of sausage. It was warm and the skin was deliciously salty.
"Tadas told one of the girls that hell is the worst place ever and there's no escape for all eternity."
"Now why would Tadas be talking of hell?" asked Papa, reaching for the vegetables.
"Because his father told him that if Stalin comes to Lithuania, we'll all end up there. — Ruta Sepetys

I've commissioned an adaptation of 'The Jungle', by Upton Sinclair, a story of a young immigrant from Lithuania to the meat-packing industry of Chicago in 1904, and the rise of the unions in America. — David Schwimmer

How did I get here How did I end up in the arms of a boy I barely knew but knew I didn't want to lose I wondered what I would have thought of Andrius in Lithuania. Would I have liked him Would he have liked me — Ruta Sepetys

She knew precious little about Lithuania, she realized, and her ideas had run along the lines of Soviet concrete ghettos, TB-infected prisons, and a callous mafia. Somehow, — Lene Kaaberbol

Vilnius was once known as 'The Jerusalem of Lithuania' because of the number of prayer houses and scholars there; in the first half of the 20th century, it became a center of Yiddish-language scholarship. — Elizabeth McCracken

In response to discrimination and persecution in the Holy Roman Empire. They had moved further east into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and, despite the violence directed against them during the 1648 Ukrainian revolt, had continued this eastward pattern of migration and settlement into the eighteenth century. With the partitions of Poland, the areas of densest Jewish settlement came under Russian rule, — Niall Ferguson

The title 'Lord of All-Rus' did not possess much basis either in history or in current reality. It came into the same category as that whereby the kings of England laid claim to France. In the 1490s, two-and-a-half centuries after all traces of a united Kievan Rus' had been destroyed, it had the same degree of credibility that the king of France might have enjoyed if, in his struggle with the German Empire, he had proclaimed himself 'Lord of all the Franks'. By that time, it conflicted with the separate identity that the 'Ruthenes' of Lithuania had assumed from the 'Russians' of Moscow. Indeed, it all seemed sufficiently unreal for the Lithuanians to accept it as a small price to pay for Ivan's good humour. They were not to know it, but they were conceding the ideological cornerstone of territorial ambitions that would be pursued for 500 years. — Norman Davies

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. — Gertrude B. Elion

The neighborhood-towns were part of larger ethnic states. To the north of the Loop was Germany. To the northwest was Poland. To the west were Italy and Israel. To the southwest were Bohemia and Lithuania. And to the south was ireland ...
you could always tell, even with your eyes closed, which state you were in by the odors of the food stores and the open kitchen windows, the sound of the foreign or familiar language, and by whether a stranger hit you in the head with a rock. — Mike Royko

In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don't care about my cinema. In Europe, they don't know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick! — Jonas Mekas

Papa Ubu: Captain Bordure, I've decided to make you Duke of Lithuania. — Alfred Jarry

It grey louder. Louder. They were singing, singing at the top of their lungs. Andrius joined, and then my brother and the gray-haired man. And finally, the bald man joined in, singing out national anthem. 'Lithuania, land of heroes... — Ruta Sepetys

Lithuanian nation must be saved, as it is the key to all the riddles - not only philology, but also in history - to solve the puzzle. — Immanuel Kant

It shouldn't be the asylum seekers wondering which country they want go to. It should be Europe telling them where to be, be it Lithuania, Sweden, or wherever. — Mark Rutte

The Soviet Union had achieved an unusual boon through the pact. The Eastern part of Europe, from the Baltic to the Black Sea was declared as their sphere of influence. They spelled out by name the three Baltic republics: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia - all three formerly, under the tsars, Russian territory. The two signatories included as part of the Soviet sphere of influence Bessarabia. Northern Bukovina had not been included in that sinister deal, yet Russia made its own decision to annex it, together with Bessarabia. They made it a kind of connecting bridge to Southern Poland. — Pearl Fichman

Just as the Russians and the Soviets didn't manage to wipe out languages in Lithuania, neither have they managed to wipe out religion to the extent that we had feared. — Jeane Kirkpatrick

A Lithuanian friend asked me what am I doing in Lithuania. If I knew the answer I would probably not be in Lithuania talking to her. — Robin Sacredfire

I require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous, but at some point, I'll wander off by myself. The paradox is that what began in childhood as an act of necessary solitude has led me straight to a life with others, in which I fly to China or Lithuania or northern Minnesota to read my poems and talk with other people who love language made into a lathe on which a life can be tuned and be turned. — Jane Hirshfield

My parents were born and brought up in New York City. My father was trained as an electrical engineer, and my mother was an elementary school teacher. They were the children of Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States from England and Lithuania in the late 1800s. — David Lee