Ukrainian Sayings And Quotes

If you don’t play, you lose. There was a Ukrainian woman at the market selling big red apples. ‘Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!’ Someone told her not to advertise that, no one will buy them. ‘Don’t worry!’ she says. ‘They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their boss.’

Kyiv is a bilingual capital, something unusual in Europe and unthinkable in Russia and the United States. Europeans, Russians, and Americans rarely considered that everyday bilingualism might bespeak political maturity, and imagined instead that a Ukraine that spoke two languages must be divided into two groups and two halves. "Ethnic Ukrainians" must be a group that acts in one way, and "ethnic Russians" in another. This is about as true as to say that "ethnic Americans" vote Republican. It is more a summary of a politics that defines people by ethnicity, proposing to them an eternity of grievance rather than a politics of the future.

Stop calling it war, for war implies faults on both sides. It's an invasion, where the state of Russia is the aggressor and the people of Ukraine are the victim. And stop saying that your prayers are with the Ukrainian people, for prayers may give you comfort, but it does nothing to alleviate their suffering. Shred all hypocritical advocacy of human rights and be involved in a meaningful way that actually helps the victims of Russian imperialism.

Albanian dogs go “ham ham.” In Catalan, dogs go “bup bup.” The Chinese dogs say “wang wang,” the Greek dogs go “gav gav,” the Slovenians “hov hov,” and the Ukrainians “haf haf.” In Iceland, it’s “voff,” in Indonesia, it’s “gong gong,” and in Italian, it’s “bau bau.

We used to pay too little attention to utopias, or even disregard them altogether, saying with regret they were impossible of realisation. Now indeed they seem to be able to be brought about far more easily than we supposed, and we are actually faced by an agonising problem of quite another kind: how can we prevent their final realisation? ... Utopias are more realisable than those 'realist politics' that are only the carefully calculated policies of office-holders, and towards utopias we are moving. But it is possible that a new age is already beginning, in which cultured and intelligent people will dream of ways to avoid ideal states and to get back to a society that is less 'perfect' and more free.

During the day we lived in the new place, and at night we lived at home - in our dreams." "Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There's nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air." "There was a Ukrainian woman at the market selling big red apples. 'Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!' Someone told her not to advertise that, no on will buy them. 'Don't worry!' she says. 'They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their bosses.

In my native valley of the middle Dniester, gentry spoke Polish, peasants — Ukrainian, officials — Russian with the Odessa accent, merchants — Jewish, carpenters and joiners — being Filippians and Old Believers — Russian with the Novogrod accent, the kabanists spoke in their own dialect. Additionally, in the same area there were also villages of Polish-speaking noblemen, and nobles who spoke Ukrainian, Moldovan villages speaking in Romanian; Gypsies speaking in Gypsy, Turks were no longer there, but in Khotyn, on the other side of the Dniester and in Kamieniec, their minarets were still standing...All these shades of nationality and languages were also in a semi-fluid state. Sons of Poles sometimes became Ukrainians, sons of Germans and French — Poles. In Odessa, unusual things happened: the Greeks became Russians, Poles were seen joining Soyuz Russkavo Naroda. Even stranger combinations arose from mixed marriages. ‘If a Pole marries a Russian woman,’ my father used to say, ‘their children are usually Ukrainians or Lithuanians’.

But I must tell you, comrade Lenin, that your assertion that the anarchists don’t understand ‘the present’ realistically, that they have no real connection with it and so forth, is fundamentally mistaken. The anarchist-communists in the Ukraine (or the ‘South of Russia’ to you communist-bolsheviks who try to avoid the word Ukraine), the anarchist-communists, I say, have already given many proofs that they are firmly pklanted in ‘the present’. The whole struggle of the revolutionary Ukrainian countryside against the Central Rada has been carried out under the ideological guidance of the anarchist-communists and also in part by the Socialist Revolutionaries (who, of course, have entirely different aims from the anarchist-communists in their struggle against the Central Rada). Your Bolsheviks have scarcely any presence in our villages. Where they have penetrated, their influence is minimal. Almost all the communes or peasant associations in the Ukraine were formed at the instigation of the anarchist-communists. The armed struggle of the working people against the counter-revolution in general and the Austro-German invasion in particular has been undertaken with the ideological and organic guidance of the anarchist-communists exclusively.

just agreed to buy some decommissioned Saudi antiaircraft missiles for twelve million dollars and is planning to kidnap a racehorse as down payment. “The chrysanthemums are beautiful,” says the woman. “Exquisite.” A kidnapped racehorse was not ideal, as far as Martin Lomax was concerned, but if both sides were happy with the arrangement he has ample stabling by the paddock. He has done business with the Ukrainians before and found them violent but trustworthy. Martin Lomax will get the local Scout troop to run a refreshment stall on one of the Open Garden days. Water and so on. People need water, he has noticed. They go crazy for the stuff.

Dear Ukrainians,” Zelensky said in his inauguration address. “After my election win, my six-year-old son said: ‘Dad, they say on TV that Zelensky is the president…. So, it means that I am the President too?!’ At the time, it sounded funny, but later I realized that it was true. Because each of us is the president. “From now on, each of us is responsible for the country that we leave to our children,” Zelensky said. “Each of us, in his place, can do everything for the prosperity of Ukraine.” He raised his first priority: a cease-fire in the Donbas where Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces had been fighting since Putin’s 2014 invasion. “I have been often asked: What price are you ready to pay for the cease-fire? It’s a strange question,” Zelensky said. “What price are you ready to pay for the lives of your loved ones? I can assure that I’m ready to pay any price to stop the deaths of our heroes. I’m definitely not afraid to make difficult decisions and I’m ready to lose my fame, my ratings, and if need be without any hesitation, my position to bring peace, as long as we do not give up our territories. “History is unfair,” Zelensky added. “We are not the ones who have started this war. But we are the ones who have to finish it. “I really do not want you to hang my portraits on your office walls. Because a president is not an icon and not an idol. A president is not a portrait. Hang pictures of your children. And before you make any decision, look into their eyes,” he said. “And finally,” Zelensky concluded, “all my life I tried to do all I could so that Ukrainians laughed. That was my mission. Now I will do all I can so that Ukrainians at least do not cry anymore.