Political Quotes

“Mr. President, last week, my staff found a photo from a congressional trip I made to Eastern Europe in 1991. In one of the photos, I was standing in front of a wall. There is a message on the wall painted in big letters. It reads: ``Freedom for Baltic Countries.'' I remember that trip. The trip had special resonance for me and my family. Eight decades earlier, my mother--only 2 years old--she and her family fled one of those Baltic nations--Lithuania--to escape the tyranny of czarist Russia, and they found freedom in America. Here I was--her son--returning to the Baltics in a remarkable moment in history. You see, 2 years earlier, in August 1989, 2 million people--I will show you the photo of this because it is historic--2 million people in the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia joined hands to form a 373-mile-long Baltic chain of freedom. This human chain spanned the three nations and sent a clear message that the Baltic nations wanted to reclaim their freedom and their independence from the brutal occupation first by czarist Russia, then by Nazi Germany, and finally by the Soviet Union. Months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Baltic chain of freedom forecast the end of the Soviet Union. But who were these countries to defy the Soviet Union? Countries with barely 3 million population in Lithuania, 2 million in Latvia, and 1\1/2\ million in Estonia were setting out to defy the superpower of the Soviet Union.…”