Romania

"Romania has made a remarkable journey from tyranny to freedom, from captive nation to NATO ally -- and it happened, its happened in the space of a single generation."

"Every time I come to Romania, Im impressed again at just how much progress youve made. In a single generation your country has risen from tyranny to join the ranks of the worlds free nations, the European Union, and the most powerful alliance in human history, the NATO alliance."

"There is no timeless Romania, however. It is my view that the countrys distinctive characteristics are to be explained by history and by the current social situation. Todays Romania does not much resemble yesterdays. Nor will the Romania of tomorrow be much like that of today."

"Who was your geography teacher? Romania lies in Europe, in France..."

"We must make cleverness our national trait... Stop showing a sullen, frowning face and clenched fist to the West. Start making it feel compassion for us, and youll see how fast Western boycotts change into magnanimity. Lets present Romania as a Latin island in the Slavic sea... Our millenia-old traditions of independence are now up against Moscows political centrism... A pawn between two superpowers."

"The Romanian constitution of 1866 was simply an imitation of the Belgian one of 1833. This was a remarkable performance: Romania was an agrarian country of rural-patriarchal type, while Belgium was one of the most industrialized and bourgeois countries on the continent. Given all the constitutions available to choose from, the Romanians opted for the most advanced and liberal of them all!"

"America knows that Romanias destiny lies in an undivided, democratic, peaceful Europe, where every nation is free, and every free nation is the partner of the United States. To all the people of Romania who love freedom so dearly: I come to Romania because of all you have already done. I come because I know what you still can do. I come because of all that we must do together to achieve your destiny in the family of freedom."

"After I had told them about my country for so long, stories both true and imagined, my family and friends wanted to hear for themselves what the new story was. One day, I told everyone, we will all go to Romania to eat plums from apple trees, pears from poplars, honey from streams. Romania was more fairy tale than real place to them; but now a miracle had taken place, and the fairy tale had sprung to life."

"The values that govern Romania today -- liberty, openness, tolerance, free markets -- these are values shared by the community of democracies Romania is joining."

"Situated at the very center of the ancient spice routes of the Orient, Romania was the golden apple that made everyones mouth water, and consequently, everyone, the Goths, Visigoths, Huns, Slavs, Austrians, and Soviets, tried to swallow it whole. Amazingly enough, it survived the battering rams of a ceaselessly hostile history for hundreds of years until the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu began accomplishing in a few years what the combined horrors of numberless invaders were unable to."

"Driving through the Rumanian countryside I found was an unmixed pleasure. The landscape is very beautiful, and entirely unspoiled. The roads are either Roman and straight, or romantic and devious and narrow. There is little traffic, and one moves fast."

"Because of its lack of geographical unity, Romania is a place full of contrasts."