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 visitor in the early hours will be the milkman.
ADAM MICHNIKStart doing the things you think should be done, and start being what you think society should become.
More Adam Michnik Quotes
-
-
Demagoguery and populism are rampant. We are the illegitimate children, the bastards of communism. It shaped our mentality.
ADAM MICHNIK -
There were free elections in Bulgaria, where the opposition has just won.
ADAM MICHNIK -
I believe that a man can only be useful to his country when he can look at it clearly.
ADAM MICHNIK -
In a democracy, the government is a reflection of society because people are elected.
ADAM MICHNIK -
I consider that 9/11 was the day when war was started against my own work and against myself.
ADAM MICHNIK -
A part of society in our countries would still prefer an authoritarian regime today. These are people with the mentality of Homo sovieticus. But they also exist in France – just think of Le Pen – and even in Finland and Sweden.
ADAM MICHNIK -
I think you can be an enemy of Saddam Hussein even if Donald Rumsfeld is also an enemy of Saddam Hussein.
ADAM MICHNIK -
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 and the French left. They keep thinking that Americans are primitive cowboys or farmers who do not understand anything.
ADAM MICHNIK -
We lack a political culture, a culture of compromise. We in Poland, as well as the Hungarians, have never learned this sort of thing.
ADAM MICHNIK -
Israel is the only country in the Middle East where Arabs can be elected to the parliament in a democratic election.
ADAM MICHNIK -
The call to finally clean house is a propaganda tool of the right, which tolerates the leftists who it condemns.
ADAM MICHNIK -
If you’re powerful, you are much more likely to be blind and deaf to signals from outside.
ADAM MICHNIK -
We still have politicians who strive for a different type of country: Kaczynski as well as Orbán in Hungary.
ADAM MICHNIK -
After the fall of communism in Poland, we had a post-communist as president for two terms: Aleksander Kwasniewski. He was very good. He brought Poland into NATO and the European Union.
ADAM MICHNIK -
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 nation those who think differently.
ADAM MICHNIK