Quotes from Adam Michnik

Israel is the only country in the Middle East where Arabs can be elected to the parliament in a democratic election.

The real struggle for us is for the citizen to cease to be the property of the state.

I think you can be an enemy of Saddam Hussein even if Donald Rumsfeld is also an enemy of Saddam Hussein.

But you do know, as you stand alone, handcuffed, with your eyes filled with tear gas, in front of policemen who are shaking their guns at you-you can see it clearly in the dark and starless night, thanks to your favourite poet - that the course of the avalanche depends on the stone over which it rolls. And you want to be the stone that will reverse the course of events.

The worst thing about Communism is what comes after.

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. But in both countries, 1968 gave birth to a new political consciousness.

I believe that a man can only be useful to his country when he can look at it clearly.

The real struggle for us is for the citizen to cease to be the property of the state.

Politics and ethics belong to different worlds.

Why am I such a Euro-enthusiast? Because I knew it was an anchor of democracy.

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.

I do not accept being a prisoner of fear. Of Communism, of fascism. That, one can bear. But of one's fear. No. Never.

The threat to Russia isn't liberal Europe or America. It is nonliberal Islam and nonliberal China. Russia has to change. It can't be otherwise. It will take time. You have to be patient.

Politics is the art of realizing what there is to realize.

I do know that you have to choose between the logic of reconciliation and the logic of justice. Pure justice leads to new civil war. I prefer the negotiable revolution.

In Czechoslovakia in 1968, communist reformers appealed to democratic ideals that were deeply rooted in the country's pre-second world war past.

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 is based on an opposite premise - that there are causes worth suffering and dying for.

If you're powerful, you are much more likely to be blind and deaf to signals from outside.

Politics is the art of achieving political goals - of achieving what is possible in a given situation - that is, in a situation that has its conditions and its limits.

After the French Revolution, it was not the treason of the king that was in question; it was the existence of the king. You have to be very careful when you judge and execute somebody for being a symbol.

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.

I think you can be an enemy of Saddam Hussein even if Donald Rumsfeld is also an enemy of Saddam Hussein.

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 the links, Iraq was one of the countries that did not lower its flags in mourning on 9/11.

An ethical action, like an unethical action, is usually analyzed by politicians purely in pragmatic terms.