Adam Michnik Quotes

Churchill knew instinctively what was wrong with communism - that it repressed liberty; that it replaced individual discretion with state control; that it entailed the curtailment of democracy, and therefore that it was tyrannous.

Right now, we have no possibility of politics because we have a one-party state.

Every one of the world's dictatorships can and does claim to be acting in the name of the people.

But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.

Because if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom.

When the United States aligns with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, it compromises the basic democratic principles of its foundation - namely, life, liberty and justice for all.

Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party - though they are quite numerous - is no freedom at all.

The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.

Nondemocratic regimes imperil the security of the world. They stay in power by controlling their populations. This control invariably requires an increasing amount of repression. To justify this repression and maintain internal stability, external enemies must be manufactured.

I will never abuse power if elected.... This country [Russia] can never again fall under the influence of a dictator.

There is no such thing as a liberal dictatorship, because a dictator just cannot afford to be liberal.

Even the most repressive regimes seek to maintain the fiction that they have the people’s interest at heart.

Every dictatorship creates thousands of smaller dictators who live on for decades.

Witness the tragic condition of Russia. The methods of State centralization have paralyzed individual initiative and effort; the tyranny of the dictatorship has cowed the people into slavish submission and all but extinguished the fires of liberty; organized terrorism has depraved and brutalized the masses and stifled every idealistic aspiration; institutionalized murder has cheapened human life, and all sense of the dignity of man and the value of life has been eliminated; coercion at every step has made effort bitter, labor a punishment, has turned the whole of existence into a scheme of mutual deceit, and has revived the lowest and most brutal instincts of man.

Romania, which had the worst dictator in Eastern Europe, Ceausescu, he was a darling of the West. The United States and Britain loved him. He was supported until the last minute.

One thing my father said was that if you find yourself in a country where you have to carry papers, you know it has a lousy government.

One doesn't want one's democracy to behave like a dictatorial or fascistic police. One doesn't.

North Koreans are tragically oppressed. Despite the risks to my personal safety, I feel a strong obligation to tell the world about the Orwellian nightmare that North Koreans face.

The North Korean regime really can control people. I think they are the best dictator in the whole planet.

To compare the United States of America - the beacon of the free world - to the brutal North Korean dictatorship is as insulting as it is asinine.

Once you get a tyranny, you don't easily get rid of it. Much better to remember about eternal vigilance.

Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent a dictator, that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. Best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and government would prevent any economical growth.

A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.

In any nation in which people's rights have been subordinated to the rights of the few, in any totalitarian nation, the first institution to be dismantled is the jury. I was, I am, afraid.

Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited.