Vasil Ivanovski

“ To expose those maneuvers of the occupiers and demonstrate that they have no right over Macedonia, to hinder their assimilation policy and to fight consistently for the right of the Macedonian people to self-determination until its separation from the Bulgarian, Serbian and Greek imperialist states, and its unification into an independent republic of the working Macedonian people, we Macedonians should state resolutely that we are neither Serbs, nor Greeks, nor Bulgarians, but a separate Macedonian nation fighting for our national liberation and the separation of our Macedonian state. ”

“ Bulgarian and Serbian expansionist chauvinists use the closeness of the Macedonian language to the languages of their nations to claim that Macedonians are "part of the Bulgarian nation" or "pure Serbs". But we Macedonians are neither one nor the other. We are not a "dough from which anything can be baked," as Cvijich, one of Serbia's warring policy historians, said. We are a separate nation. The similarity of our language with Bulgarian and Serbian is a simple resemblance between the languages of close, but independently developed nations. ”

“ Nations are not tribes. Like other nations, the Macedonian nation was not created by one tribe, but by several different tribes or, more precisely, by parts of several different tribes: Illyrians, Slavs, Bulgarians, Serbs and others. The basic element is Slavic. The ancient Illyrians merged with the later Slavs who came to Macedonia. The Bulgarian and Serbian elements in the Macedonian nation are the result of the fact that even before the Turkish slavery, Macedonia fell under either Bulgarian or under Serbian rule. ”