Adam Michnik Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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Here's the thing: I left Ion Storm and Eidos in the spring of 2004 frankly because I felt out of place at that company.
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I just see religious freedom, as a category, as just being a black hole.
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The South resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box and the Civil Rights Law.
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These years after my liberation were years of reconstruction, and I think I made the right decisions... I mean, I lost everything: my life; my father died; I didn't know anything about my children.
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How do you deal with a criminal that will not listen to what you have to say and who continues his policy of violence? Some say you continue to talk and let him tire himself out. But nearly 40 years after the institution of apartheid, is there anyone who still believes that verbal persuasion will work?
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Before this learning experience, I had assumed that with regard to programs that sought to help people out of poverty, the political world was essentially divided into two camps: conservatives who opposed these for a variety of reasons, and liberals who supported them.
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One of the defining dynamics of 2008 has been the emerging wave of new, young voters getting involved and storming the gates of the traditional political establishment.
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The genius of the American Founders was to create an intricate system of balanced powers both within the state and between state and society - a system that has fostered unprecedented political, social, and intellectual freedom.
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My father always said, 'Malala will be free as a bird.'
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You can think what you like of Madonna - about her political choices and her PR - but you have to respect her courage not to let the critics stop her exploring her potential.
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The law of the Creator, which invests every human being with an inalienable title to freedom, cannot be repealed by any interior law which asserts that man is property.
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I have reaffirmed my political will to work towards national unity.
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If we didn't have the Albanian entrepreneurial spirit and financial support from the diaspora, this stupid political class would have destroyed the country by now.
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Over the years the political establishment has frowned if a mainstream politician mentions marriage.
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Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered.
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In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents.
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Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself.
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Many of those who have paid the ultimate price for freedom have come through the wrestling ranks. We need to honor them and win this decision to have wrestling - the world's oldest sport - remain a part of the most prestigious athletic competition in the world, the Olympics.
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There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.
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In 1968 the end of art was announced, but this was for political reasons and for the wrong reasons. At that time it was believed that as long as there were only formal relationships, one did not have to deal with a luxury such as art.
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I'm not interested in world domination. I'm interested in running a nice little brand that takes care of its own and does really good work.
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Compared with men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from one concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas are almost exclusively by contiguity. So far, however, as any brute might think by abstract characters instead of by association of con cretes, he would have to be admitted to be a reasoner in the true human sense. How far this may take place is quite uncertain.
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Meditation in action is endlessly more important than meditation in stillness.
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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.
