Best 76 quotes of Lech Walesa on MyQuotes

Our national history has so often filled us with bitterness and the feeling of helplessness.

Power is only important as an instrument for service to the powerless.

President Lech Kaczynski is not at all active in Poland and his image abroad leaves a lot to be desired.

The defense of our rights and our dignity, as well as efforts never to let ourselves to be overcome by the feeling of hatred - this is the road we have chosen.

The fall of the Berlin Wall makes for nice pictures. But it all started in the shipyards.

The hope of the nation which throughout the nineteenth century had not for a moment reconciled itself with the loss of independence, and fighting for its own freedom, fought at the same time for the freedom of other nations.

The people in Poland had to deal with painful reforms.

The politicians always told us that the Cold War stand-off could only change by way of nuclear war. None of them believed that such systemic change was possible.

The program of our movement stems from the fundamental moral laws and order.

The sole and basic source of our strength is the solidarity of workers, peasants and the intelligentsia, the solidarity of the nation, the solidarity of people who seek to live in dignity, truth, and in harmony with their conscience.

The United States is only one superpower. Today they lead the world. Nobody has doubts about it. Militarily. They also lead economically but they're getting weak. But they don't lead morally and politically anymore. The world has no leadership. The United States was always the last resort and hope for all other nations. There was the hope, whenever something was going wrong, one could count on the United States. Today, we lost that hope.

This conviction brought me, in the summer of 1978, to the Free Trade Unions - formed by a group of courageous and dedicated people who came out in the defense of the workers' rights and dignity.

This is the moment of your defeat; you have just put in the last nails in the coffin of communism.

We hold our heads high, despite the price we have paid, because freedom is priceless.

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.

We need a global parliament, a global government and possibly a global ministry for security.

We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.

What until then seemed impossible to achieve has become a fact of life. We have won the right to association in trade unions independent from the authorities, founded and shaped by the working people themselves.

When he saw injustice, he wanted to do away with it. He saw communism, and he wanted to put an end to it.

When I recall my own path of life I cannot but speak of the violence, hatred and lies. A lesson drawn from such experiences, however, was that we can effectively oppose violence only if we ourselves do not resort to it.

When I was fighting communism, there was rapid development of satellite television and cell phones, and communism, to survive, would have to block all these information devices.

Without a single shot we've managed to liberate the world of communism but now there is a need for a global solidarity.

Words are plentiful; deeds are precious.

You have riches and freedom here but I feel no sense of faith or direction. You have so many computers, why don't you use them in the search for love?

You should go to the polls, organize yourself. But once lawmakers are chosen, they must be respected.

When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty. This can't be said often enough by people who lived under oppression for half a century, until communism fell in 1989.