Adam Michnik Quotes

24 quotes in 377 categories

• Start doing the things you think should be done, and start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in free speech? Then…
• The real struggle for us is for the citizen to cease to be the property of the state.
• I believe that a man can only be useful to his country when he can look at it clearly.
• If you're powerful, you are much more likely to be blind and deaf to signals from outside.
• Israel is the only country in the Middle East where Arabs can be elected to the parliament in a democratic election.
• I think it's always dangerous to make political arguments in a religiously ideological way. And it's very dangerous to treat as traitors to the American…
• I consider that 9/11 was the day when war was started against my own work and against myself. Even though we are not sure of…
• Poland is an ally of the United States of America. It was our duty to show that we are a reliable, loyal, and predictable ally.…
• France can never accept that it is no longer a dominating power in the world of culture. This is true both of the French right…
• I can't remember any text of mine where I said that one should fight Hitler without violence; I'm not an idiot.
• As a rule, dictatorships guarantee safe streets and terror of the doorbell. In democracy the streets may be unsafe after dark, but the most likely…
• Politics is the art of achieving political goals - of achieving what is possible in a given situation - that is, in a situation that…
• An ethical action, like an unethical action, is usually analyzed by politicians purely in pragmatic terms.
• Politics and ethics belong to different worlds.
• Every revolution, bloody or not, has two phases. The first phase is defined by the struggle for freedom, the second by the struggle for power…
• Why am I such a Euro-enthusiast? Because I knew it was an anchor of democracy.
• Pacifism as a mass movement aims to avoid suffering; pacifists often say that no cause is worth suffering or dying for. The ethos of Solidarity…
• Politics is the art of realizing what there is to realize.
• For those of us imprisoned in Poland, the Prague Spring was a harbinger of hope.
• The Polish freedom movement of 1968 lost its confrontation with police violence; the Prague Spring was crushed by the armies of five Warsaw Pact members.…

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