“Poland is like an island on the north European plain. At times the island has been swamped by a tide of iron or steel helmets converging from Germany and Russia. At times it has drifted suddenly with the current; if the continent of Africa had drifted relatively as much as the boundaries of Poland have drifted in the last two hundred years, then Africa would at one time have touched the north pole and at another the south pole.”

— Geoffrey Blainey

Across a Red World (1968)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Poland is like an island on the north European plain. At times the island has been swamped by a tide of iron or steel h…" by Geoffrey Blainey?

Geoffrey Blainey 72

Australian historian 1930

Related quotes

“Africa north of the Sahara, from a zoological point of view, is now, and has been since early Tertiary times, a part of Europe. This is true both of animals and of the races of man. The Berbers of north Africa to-day are racially identical with the Spaniards and south Italians.”

Madison Grant book The Passing of the Great Race

Page 152.
The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

“Of course [the opposition] can be supported! I mean, for God’s sake, from Solidarity in Poland to the ANC in South Africa… there was a great degree of support. But they [the Poles and South Africans] did it. It was not some foreign country doing it.”

Reza Pahlavi (1960) Last crown prince of the former Imperial State of Iran

As quoted by Emily Esfahani Smith, Pahlavi's Hope for a Better Iran http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/pahlavis-hope-better-iran, The Weekly Standard, Feb 18, 2010.
Interviews, 2010

“In Russia, they say I'm a Pole, in Poland they call me Russian.”

Konstantin Rokossovsky (1896–1968) Soviet and Polish military commander

Quoted in "Rokossowski - How Much of a Pole? - by Wiesław Białkowski, 1994.

“If we had allowed things to drift, everything would have gone from bad to worse. Nasser would have become a kind of Moslem Mussolini, and our friends in Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and even Iran would gradually have been brought down. His efforts would have spread westwards, and Libya and North Africa would have been brought under his control.”

Anthony Eden (1897–1977) British Conservative politician, prime minister

Eden to Eisenhower (5 November 1956), quoted in Peter G. Boyle (ed.), The Eden-Eisenhower Correspondence, 1955-1957 (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), p. 183

“The more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes to me that the Poles are une nation foutue [a fucked nation] who can only continue to serve a purpose until such time as Russia herself becomes caught up into the agrarian revolution. From that moment Poland will have absolutely no raison d'étre any more. The Poles' sole contribution to history has been to indulge in foolish pranks at once valiant and provocative. Nor can a single moment be cited when Poland, even if only by comparison with Russia, has successfully represented progress or done anything of historical significance.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

Letter https://marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1851/letters/51_05_23.htm to Karl Marx (23 May 1851)

“Eventually, I'd like one monitor at the North Pole, one at the South, and two at the equator, big monitors switching images back and forth.”

Ira Schneider (1939) American artist

Ira Schneider (1969), Arts Magazine, Vol. 44, p. 22

“South America had been an island continent, far bigger and far more diverse than Australia, for tens of millions of years before the Isthmus of Panama rose just a couple of million years ago. The resulting flood of North American mammals across the new land bridge corresponds in time with the decimation of the native South American fauna. In fact, most large mammals generally considered distinctly South American… are all recent migrants from North America.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?" pp. 390
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“Paralleling the corporate shift away from manufacturing goods to manufacturing brands, Christianity in North America has drifted from a faith of substance to a faith of perception.”

Skye Jethani

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

“I've had a great time in South America and South Africa. Indeed it now seems that on this pair of wild hot continents I've enjoyed the most fruitful year of my life.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

letter to William Colby (4 February 1912); published in " John Muir — President of the Sierra Club http://archive.org/stream/sierraclubbullet1019sier#page/n17/mode/2up", by William E. Colby, Sierra Club Bulletin, volume 10, number 1 (John Muir Memorial Issue, January 1916) pages 2-7 (at page 6); and in John Muir's Last Journey, edited by Michael P. Branch (Island Press, 2001), page 160
1910s

“I wanted to go everywhere. I would have started on a day’s notice for the North Pole or the South, to the jungle or the desert. It made not the slightest difference to me.”

Roy Chapman Andrews (1884–1960) American explorer, adventurer and naturalist

From 'Under a Lucky Star' published 1943 http://www.roychapmanandrewssociety.org/adventures.html

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Geoffrey Blainey 72

Related quotes

Related topics