Adam Michnik Quotes

Assassins and presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are?

When you meet powerful men or just read about them in the newspapers, you see that they don't have a sense of boundaries.

Powerful people are always in charge. You have to acknowledge that and deal with it as a reality. They're not devils. They're not monsters. They're human beings, like us, that have their share of insecurities and fears. You have to contemplate that as you go through life.

What's certain is that ranking powerful people is inherently self-defeating. For starters, true potentates know who they are without being told, and they have no need to announce it.

The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.

It doesn't matter how much wisdom you have. If you don't have position, you have nothing. That's the tragedy of India.

My opinion's no more important than anyone else's. It's just that I have the ability to have access to more ears when I speak because of my job.

Power says if you are a committee chairman, your idea is good only because you have got power.

The people who exercise the power are not always the same people over whom it is exercised.

It's hubris to think that the way we see things is everything there is.

Power is a very peculiar thing. It's like the ego. The ego's only there to keep you above water. Once we realize something good about ourselves, we have a tendency to abuse the gift.

Steve Bannon puts himself above everything.

Power is all. Another falsification; I do not tell how I gain or maintain it. I only record the ginger stroll through the vaguely fetid garden of its rewards.

Any one prominent in affairs can always see when a man may steal a horse and when a man may not look over a hedge.

Money buys access; access buys influence.

As an actor, when you're actually trying to embody what it would be like to just know that everyone's at your beck and call, it's quite a thing to absorb what that might be like and what that would do.

If the fools do not control the world, it isn't because they are not in the majority.

I like being powerful. I hope it doesn't go to my head. If somebody's going to have it, it might just as soon be me. There's always power, and it's just a matter of in whose hands it falls.

I don't have to make a point. I'm George Bush. I'm the president. I built that arena, so I don't have to make a point.

Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on.

If there's anything worse than knowing too little, it's knowing too much. Education will broaden a narrow mind, but there's no known cure for a big head. The best you can hope is that it will swell up and bust.

I ask people what piece they are on the chessboard. And some people say 'I'm the king' or 'I'm the knight.' And then they ask me what piece I am, and I say, 'I'm no piece. I take the position of God.'

Wherever there is power there is age.

To me, the movie is about power.