Top 80 Lech Walesa Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “My most ardent desire is that my country will recapture its historic opportunity for a peaceful evolution and that Poland will prove to the world that even the most complex situations can be solved by a dialogue and not by force.”

— Lech Walesa

52. “Obviously people want social calm, but if you do not let clever and ingenious people to participate, obviously there must be some dormant volcano that will erupt, sooner or later.”

— Lech Walesa

53. “I don’t like to look a man in the eye.”

— Lech Walesa

54. “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.”

— Lech Walesa

55. “Building democracy as an imposition from abroad is a form of imperialism.”

— Lech Walesa

56. “It is not difficult to censor foreign news. What is difficult today is to censor one’s own thoughts, To sit by and see the blind man On the sightless horse, riding into the bottomless abyss.”

— Lech Walesa

57. “Freedom may be the soul of humanity, but often you have to struggle to prove it.”

— Lech Walesa

58. “I belong to a nation which over the past centuries has experienced many hardships and reverses. The world reacted with silence or with mere sympathy when Polish frontiers were crossed by invading armies and the sovereign state had to succumb to brutal force.”

— Lech Walesa

59. “My health is very much improved.”

— Lech Walesa

60. “Dictators and oppressors should continue to fear me because I will be here for a long time.”

— Lech Walesa

61. “Communists are great capitalists, so there is no threat anymore.”

— Lech Walesa

62. “The people in Poland had to deal with painful reforms.”

— Lech Walesa

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

— Lech Walesa

64. “I think if I got a bicycle from my father, I should give a car to my son.”

— Lech Walesa

65. “I am happy that Poland is returning to the road of pluralism and democracy.”

— Lech Walesa

66. “Authority must be respected and chosen wisely.”

— Lech Walesa

67. “I made the right decisions, I set everything on the right course, the reforms are going in the right direction.”

— Lech Walesa

68. “I most sincerely wish that the world in which we live be free from the threat of a nuclear holocaust and from the ruinous arms race. It is my cherished desire that peace be not separated from freedom which is the right of every nation. This I desire and for this I pray.”

— Lech Walesa

69. “For now, capitalism is working to produce more money but does not see the people. This problem is getting worse across the world.”

— Lech Walesa

70. “I allowed myself to be taken in by the intellectuals. I believed too much in the Polish intellectuals and followed their advice.”

— Lech Walesa

71. “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.”

— Lech Walesa

72. “Lying at the root of the social agreements of 1980 are the courage, sense of responsibility, and the solidarity of the working people. Both sides have then recognized that an accord must be reached if bloodshed is to be prevented.”

— Lech Walesa

73. “I realize that the strivings of the Polish people gave rise, and still do so, to the feelings of understanding and solidarity all over the world.”

— Lech Walesa

74. “Irrespective of todays judgment and the price we had to pay in this generation, we were able to close an epoch of divisions, different blocs and borders, opening the way for an era of globalization.”

— Lech Walesa

75. “I have a vision, and I know I’m right.”

— Lech Walesa

76. “Communism is a monopolistic system, economically and politically.”

— Lech Walesa

77. “I got politics and economics moving and then others took over.”

— Lech Walesa

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

— Lech Walesa

79. “Capitalism is in crisis.”

— Lech Walesa

80. “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.”

— Lech Walesa

81. “I can’t imagine the right wing trying to unite without my participation.”

— Lech Walesa

82. “I am overjoyed that I do not need a heart transplant at this time.”

— Lech Walesa