Leadership Quote by Eduard Shevardnadze

Gratitude is doing double duty here: it thanks the West while quietly warning everyone not to get too comfortable.

Shevardnadze’s line comes from the anxious hinge moment of the early post-Soviet years, when Georgia was newly independent, economically shattered, and politically fragile. In public, he performs the necessary diplomacy of a small state courting donors: Germany, the Netherlands, “other states” get named not just as benefactors but as validators. Listing them is a way of anchoring Georgia’s future in Europe’s moral and financial imagination, signaling: we belong in your orbit, and your investment will matter.

Then comes the turn that gives the sentence its steel: “But a day will come…” It’s a promise disguised as a warning. The subtext is that external help is conditional, fickle, and inevitably political. Aid comes with expectations; alliances come with limits. Shevardnadze isn’t only speaking to foreign capitals. He’s also speaking to domestic audiences who might pin salvation on Western money or protection. The message: statehood can’t be outsourced.

The rhetoric is calibrated for a leader who knows dependence is a trap. “Our own resources” isn’t romantic self-reliance; it’s a sober admission that sovereignty is measured by what you can sustain when attention shifts elsewhere. In a region where patronage from big powers has historically come with strings attached, the quote reads like a preemptive inoculation: accept help, bank the goodwill, but build the capacity to stand when the applause - and the funding - moves on.