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Daily Inspiration Quote by Viktor Yushchenko

"We can and must turn this page if we are friends and are prepared to look one another in the eye"

About this Quote

There is a quiet dare embedded in Yushchenko's line: reconciliation is not a mood, it's an act of political risk. "Turn this page" is the statesman's favorite metaphor because it implies forward motion without litigating every sentence of the past. But Yushchenko doesn't let anyone slip out on poetic fumes. He yokes the soft language of friendship to a hard condition: "must" and "prepared". This isn't a Hallmark appeal; it's an ultimatum dressed as civility.

The key pressure point is "look one another in the eye". It's a demand for accountability without courtroom vocabulary, a way to say: no doublespeak, no private deals, no plausible deniability. Eye contact becomes a proxy for truth-telling in a region where politics has often run on backroom arrangements, oligarchic leverage, and strategic amnesia. If you can't meet my gaze, you're not a partner; you're a tactician.

Context matters. Yushchenko's presidency unfolded in the shadow of the Orange Revolution, a period when Ukraine was trying to re-author its civic identity while negotiating internal divides and external pressure, especially from Russia. Calls to "turn the page" can be read as an attempt to stabilize a fractured electorate and signal international maturity, but the conditional framing reveals a deeper anxiety: unity cannot be built on forced silence. Friendship, here, is not sentiment. It's a test of whether the other side will accept a shared reality - and pay the reputational price of admitting what happened before the page turns.

Quote Details

TopicFriendship
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Yushchenko, Viktor. (2026, January 17). We can and must turn this page if we are friends and are prepared to look one another in the eye. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-can-and-must-turn-this-page-if-we-are-friends-63887/

Chicago Style
Yushchenko, Viktor. "We can and must turn this page if we are friends and are prepared to look one another in the eye." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-can-and-must-turn-this-page-if-we-are-friends-63887/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We can and must turn this page if we are friends and are prepared to look one another in the eye." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-can-and-must-turn-this-page-if-we-are-friends-63887/. Accessed 18 Mar. 2026.

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Yushchenko Quote on Reconciliation and Civic Honesty
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About the Author

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Viktor Yushchenko (born February 23, 1954) is a Statesman from Ukraine.

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