Political Quotes

“It has been my honor and one of the highlights of my Senate career to watch the restoration of democracy in the Baltic States: Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. I have said on the floor many times with real pride, my mother was born in Lithuania, and she was an immigrant to this country at the age of 2. And she never made it back to her home country where she was born, but I did, even to the town where she was baptized and raised before she came to the United States. It has been quite a journey. In 1978 or 1979, I visited what was then the Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania. I am still struck by the images which were so common there: the gray Soviet approach to things both physical and otherwise and the belief that these poor people were under the subjugation of Moscow at a time when they deserved independence. And then to have served in the House of Representatives and, again, in the Senate and to watch the evolution of Lithuania as well as Latvia and Estonia as democratic countries and the amazing development where they became part of NATO and part of the European Union and became Western-viewing nations and equal partners with other countries in Europe when it came to security and democracy--it is remarkable. And yet I am not naive, I know these are smaller countries, and they will be easily overwhelmed by Russia if that were the Russian ambition.”