Lech Walesa Quotes

I'm lazy. But it's the lazy people who invented the wheel and the bicycle because they didn't like walking or carrying things.

It is hardly possible to build anything if frustration, bitterness and a mood of helplessness prevail.

We must be courageous but also reasonable. The world admires us for walking a tightrope without falling off. It asks us to keep our balance.

when Yushchenko arrived in Washington, he was greeted with the pomp and circumstance reserved for popular kings or democratic pin-ups, such as Lech Walesa, Nelson Mandela, or Pope John Paul II—he was invited to address a joint meeting of Congress, where he spoke boldly about helping Bush and the United States promote democracy and freedom in neighboring Belarus and Castro's Cuba. “Yushchenko! Yushchenko!” members of Congress roared, ten times rising to their feet in rapturous applause for this newly elected symbol of democracy on the rise in eastern Europe. Yushchenko

That was brought home even more deeply less than a year into the movement, when former Polish president and communist fighter Lech Walesa came to Illinois to support a Tea Party candidate. Why? “The United States was always the last resort and hope for all other nations,” he said. “There was the hope that whenever there was something going wrong in the world, you could count on the United States. Today we’ve lost that hope.” Walesa and others like him—people who have felt the oppression and the totalitarianism of the state at a fundamental level—understand that America is the beacon of freedom and liberty.

Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as anti-Semitism. To me, Andrei Sakharov’s isolation is as much a disgrace as Joseph Begun’s imprisonment and Ida Nudel’s exile. As is the denial of Solidarity and its leader Lech Walesa’s right to dissent. And Nelson Mandela’s interminable imprisonment.

Lech Walesa steunt het project SOS noodhulp Den Haag.

Comparing Manmohan to Mikhail Gorbachev and Lech Walesa – each of whom took his country on the path of liberalization – former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar declared that history would never forgive him for what he was doing to the country.

turned out, the resolve of these two hard-line politicians was soon to be tested. The seeds of the crisis they would face were sown in the unlikely location of a Polish shipyard in Gdansk, by a union official named Lech Walesa. The Solidarity trade union had been formed on September 17, 1980, after an earlier wave of strikes. It was

The genius of the movement led by Lech Walesa lay in its having imagined and implemented a bold agenda that eschewed violence and direct confrontation with the communist authorities. Indeed, it mattered a lot that the Polish opposition was entirely committed to using only nonviolent means and pursing a policy of openness, truthfulness, meticulous factual precision, genuine autonomy of action, and trust. ... As a result, one of the fundamental principles was that KOR members refused to lie in the struggle with the authorities and were determined to stick to the truth without compromise.

reform-minded general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the most powerful position in Russia, the Soviet satellites were moving toward independence. I was in Prague the night the Velvet Revolution separated Czechoslovakia from Moscow’s rule and spent time in Poland with the charismatic Lech Walesa, who led Solidarity. Nineteen eighty-nine was that kind of year. Earlier, in June, I finished a commencement address at Tulane University School of Medicine on a Saturday morning and got a call from our news desk: Chinese troops had moved on young urban protesters who had taken over Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital, demanding more political and personal freedom after a state visit from Gorbachev, who was reforming