Yugoslavia is, with Iran, the only country which under difficult, not to say agonising, circumstances stood up to Joseph Stalin. It was not easy to unite ethnic groups or to modernize a country like Yugoslavia, and it must be acknowledged that Marshal Tito achieved something extraordinary. May God grant that his successors be as capable as he.
Because I play in NBA, I am like ambassador of Yugoslavia. Los Angeles before, nobody hear of Yugoslavia. Now I think much people who look at basketball hear of Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia was a kind of superpower. Great movies. Beautiful novels. Great rock-and-roll. We became a superpower in basketball. The problem is that people needed to identify more strongly with it after Tito and his awful, tricky way of leading the country.
There can be no unified southeastern Europe without Yugoslavia, and everything else is a continuation of political blackmail with which the Serb people and Yugoslavia were faced all these years.
Capitalism has been fully restored in Yugoslavia, as is well-known, but this capitalism knows how to disguise. Yugoslavia portrays itself as a socialist state, but of a special kind, as the world has never seen it before! The Titoites even boast that their state has nothing in common with the first socialist state which emerged from the socialist October Revolution and which was founded by Lenin and Stalin on the basis of the scientific theory of Marx and Engels.
God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: 'This is my country.'
God grant, that not only the Love of Liberty, but a thorough Knowledge of the Rights of Man, may pervade all the Nations of the Earth, so that a Philosopher may set his Foot anywhere on its Surface, and say, 'This is my Country.'
Sometimes girls write me. One girl in Yugoslavia sent me a whole slew of love letters. I don't know how she got my address. She was in a crowd watching me play. She says when I left there the stars fell out of the sky over Yugoslavia, or something like that.
In 1939, Fitzroy Maclean, a gangly Highland aristocrat in his early 30s, was serving as a British diplomat in the U.S.S.R. Disgusted by the Soviet show trials, he quit the Foreign Service and would go on to serve with Tito's partisans fighting the Germans in Yugoslavia.
Patriotism, or the peculiar relation of an individual to his country, is like the family instinct. In the child it is a blind devotion; in the man in intelligent love. The patriot perceives the claim made upon his country by the circumstances and time of her growth and power, and how God is to be served by using those opportunities of helping mankind. Therefore his country's honor is dear to him as his own, and he would as soon lie and steal himself as assist or excuse his country in a crime.
I can tell you what I believe, particularly about Mexican-Americans: they are a community that has contributed greatly to this country, they work extremely hard, they've been very productive citizens of our country, and I think that's true of many ethnic groups in this country.
You know, in each segment of ex-Yugoslavia, multi-ethnic life is lost, except I think we somehow still have this in Serbia.
Yugoslavia is a little country, and everybody likes basketball. If I don't play for my national team, everybody be sad.
I never wanted an independent Bosnia. I wanted Yugoslavia. That is my country.
I remember the first time I fought somebody with a name and that was Tito Ortiz. I didn't start fighting until like the second round because I was like, 'Oh my God, that's Tito Ortiz. That's Tito Ortiz from TV. Look how big his head is, damn.'
For me, God's country is sirens and subways and all kinds of ethnic groups trying to cross the street all at once.
There is no country in Europe which is so easy to over-run as Spain; there is no country which it is more difficult to conquer.