People From Warsaw

"I thought that if I changed the things I did, it could help me play at a higher level for longer. I knew I could not expect immediate results. I did it because I had to try. I knew if I started at the top level a little later, I could be there for longer."

"I score so many goals, this means a lot. I know I will always be a little bit behind and I have to maybe work harder than those players for my country if we want to achieve something. It’s not an easy job for me, but I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. It’s a big chance."

"My body is my work. You have to be patient. Maybe you don’t see the difference after a few months, but after a few years you will see why you can play longer and stay on a higher level longer."

"If I win something, I’m very proud and very happy but I cannot get it. ... Someone made the decision like that and life goes on."

"A record is always something special for every athlete. And these 40 goals are so legendary that I still do not fully understand that I am on a par with such a legend as Gerd Müller. However, I wanted to break this record and surpass it by at least one goal. This step was my goal. But 40 goals make me proud of myself. I could not have dreamed that in one season you can score so many goals."

"Technically he was always great, now he also has that cool head. The way he scored the goals is phenomenal. For me he is the best and most complete striker in the world at the moment."

"If you see what we did in this run it is amazing, spectacular — because we won everything that we could. This is something special.... All of these awards are the prizes for something special."

"The professional player in me came out. The button changed from off to on, and I saw the difference between playing for fun and playing to win. You have to choose whether to have fun or whether to compete."

"I cannot yet assess the significance of this achievement for my future life. Even a 40-goal moment is already something special. Until now, it was simply unthinkable for me that I would be able to reach this mark, although I always give my all until the end of the season to see what the final result will be. I was aware of the debate about whether I was worthy of surpassing the historical record of Gerd Müller or not."

"It's all about the balance of the team. That's the most important point, nothing else. For that reason, it's easy for me to adapt to several different styles of play. I know I have to adapt and play for the good of the team. For me, being a strong striker is not only about being a good goalscorer."

"He showed his quality again, although he does not have to prove his class to anyone. We have to see that he is at 100 per cent, and then he is enormously important to us. And that’s why the club are not letting him go."

"He is the complete striker that I often compare to – since I was myself a striker – to a phenomenon that I played against many times myself. ​Marco van Basten. At my time, Marco van Basten was the most complete forward in the world, in the late 80s and early 90s. And I think Robert Lewandowski put his stamp on the last decade like nobody else."

"How he pushed himself to become the player he is today, that’s extraordinary. He took every step he needed to be that goal machine. Every one."

"Lewi has the most incredible body, it is just pure muscles. It just stuns the other players in the changing room."

"Lewandowski is one of the best strikers, if not the best striker, in the world."

"You don’t have much time. If you think too long or too much, sometimes that is wrong. If you have one idea and know it from the first minute, do it. Shoot. I had so little space in the box. Think too much, the defender comes to block you."

"He is the most professional player I have ever met. He is always there, never injured, because he focuses on these things. He always knows what is important to be in the best condition. But I was always very, very pleased with him, from the first moment [we met]."

"Money is important, but I didn't get carried away because ... I remember what it was like not to have the basics. However, I am glad that I was able to fulfill my childhood dreams."

"Directing TV series was an instructive experience for me at first, but it became a destructive one after a while. Today, good writers prefer working in TV rather than movies, so you’ll find better and sharper writing there. But most series are conventional: the storytelling has to be efficient, and the dramaturgy is always the same—the end of the last act is intended to hook you into watching the next episode. And for me, [directing series] means losing the innocence you need to make films, a process in which you don’t know what tools you may discover along the way to move the story forward."

"What humiliation, what disgrace for us all, that it should be necessary for one man to exhort other men not to be inhuman and irrational towards their fellow-creatures! Do they recognise, then, no mind, no soul in them — have they not feeling, pleasure in existence, do they not suffer pain? Do their voices of joy and sorrow indeed fail to speak to the human heart and conscience — so that they can murder the jubilant lark, in the first joy of his spring-time, who ought to warm their hearts with sympathy, from delight in bloodshed or for their ‘sport,’ or with a horrible insensibility and recklessness only to practise their aim in shooting! Is there no soul manifest in the eyes of the living or dying animal — no expression of suffering in the eye of a deer or stag hunted to death — nothing which accuses them of murder before the avenging Eternal Justice? …. Are the souls of all other animals but man mortal, or are they essential in their organisation? Does the world-idea (Welt-Idee) pertain to them also — the soul of nature — a particle of the Divine Spirit? I know not; but I feel, and every reasonable man feels like me, it is in miserable, intolerable contradiction with our human nature, with our conscience, with our reason, with all our talk of humanity, destiny, nobility; it is in frightful (himmelschreinder) contradiction with our poetry and philosophy, with our nature and with our (pretended) love of nature, with our religion, with our teachings about benevolent design — that we bring into existence merely to kill, to maintain our own life by the destruction of other life. …. It is a frightful wrong that other species are tortured, worried, flayed, and devoured by us, in spite of the fact that we are not obliged to this by necessity; while in sinning against the defenceless and helpless, just claimants as they are upon our reasonable conscience and upon our compassion, we succeed only in brutalising ourselves. This, besides, is quite certain, that man has no real pity and compassion for his own species, so long as he is pitiless towards other races of beings."

"Nowhere have REH’s epistemological flaws and empirical disappointments been more apparent than in efforts to model financial market outcomes, which are largely driven by participants’ expectations. Beginning with Robert Shiller’s (1981) pathbreaking paper, research has shown that REH models are unable to explain the basic features of fluctuations and risk in stock markets. Likewise, in their magisterial work on the current state of international macroeconomics, Maurice Obstfeld and Kenneth Rogoff (1996: 625) concluded that “the undeniable difficulties that international economists encounter in empirically explaining nominal exchangerate movements are an embarrassment, but one shared with virtually any other field that attempts to explain asset price data.” The failures of REH explanations of aggregate outcomes gave rise to alternative approaches, most notably behavioral finance models. However, sober assessments even by the likes of Obstfeld and Rogoff did not dispel the faith of most economists that REH models would one day be able to explain financial market outcomes and macroeconomic performance."

"In the early 1970s,... economists began to embrace the Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH), according to which market participants’ expectations are “essentially the same as the predictions of the relevant economic theory” (Muth 1961: 316). What has been largely overlooked is that, … REH theorists presume that the role of market participants’ expectations in driving outcomes is not autonomous from the other components of the model. … Because REH models, by design, rule out an autonomous role for expectations, they are best viewed as derailing, rather than developing, the microfoundations approach."

"Early critics pointed out REH’s fundamental epistemological flaws. … They argued that REH, even if viewed as a bold abstraction or approximation, is grossly inadequate for representing how even minimally reasonable profit seeking participants forecast the future in real-world markets. Nevertheless, … an overwhelming majority of economists has embraced REH as the way to represent how rational individuals think about the future."

"If there is anything worthwhile doing for the sake of culture, then it is touching on subject matters and situations which link people, and not those that divide people. There are too many things in the world which divide people, such as religion, politics, history, and nationalism. If culture is capable of anything, then it is finding that which unites us all. And there are so many things which unite people. It doesn't matter who you are or who I am, if your tooth aches or mine, it's still the same pain. Feelings are what link people together, because the word "love" has the same meaning for everybody. Or "fear", or "suffering". We all fear the same way and the same things. And we all love in the same way. That's why I tell about these things, because in all other things I immediately find division."

"I don't make biographical films … None of the films is about me. Not a single one. None. I have my life and I'll simply never tell anyone what part of me is in my films. I won't ever tell anyone about that, because I don't consider that to be anyone else's business but mine. Nobody will guess where and how and in what way I fill them with my own pains. And that's an intimate aspect of my work that I keep to myself. … I won't even tell my wife — ever."

"Having followed Kieslowski around Oxford for a day, heard him speak twice, and interviewed him in private, I still find myself in search of the Kieslowski whose name appears at the beginning of some of the most remarkable films in our otherwise cinematically uninspired age. Kieslowski's rise from relative obscurity, to being universally recognised among the ranks of the world's most gifted living film-makers, was meteoric. … Listening to Kieslowski, one is struck by his self-professed lack of faith in the medium with which he has come to address what many hold to be the spiritual malaise of our times. He has become known as someone who finds redemption in our common humanity. In particular, he bemoans the camera as a "stupid" instrument, which, unlike the novel, "cannot show a character's inner feelings." Asked halfway through the Union speaker meeting whether he even likes films, Kieslowski deadpans "No". When questioned as to his greatest cinematic inspirations, he replies: "Life and Literature." As for Hollywood directors whom he admires, he thinks long before coming up with Chaplin and Hitchcock."

"I am always reluctant to single out some particular feature of the work of a major filmmaker because it tends inevitably to simplify and reduce the work. But in this book of screenplays by Krzysztof Kieślowski and his co-author, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, it should not be out of place to observe that they have the very rare ability to dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them. By making their points through the dramatic action of the story they gain the added power of allowing the audience to discover what's really going on rather than being told. They do this with such dazzling skill, you never see the ideas coming and don't realize until much later how profoundly they have reached your heart."

"It becomes clear that the Asch, Milgram and Zimbardo experiments replicated, in a compressed time, the dynamics of authority and groupthink that play a critical role in our socialization. Asch showed that once the standard is set, people will adopt it and go along with it, even if it is illogical. When the stakes are raised, as they were in Milgram's work, people may struggle with unethical commands, but the majority still obey. And when authorities set parameters but leave the decision-making to the rest of us, we still have a tendency to impose strict control on those we consider deviant. All of these findings affirm the power of culture, socialization, and our widespread fear that we will be judged and punished. Since human beings have a desperate need for safety, approval, and belonging (which yields access to group resources), the worst kind of punishment is ostracism. This shunning may be subtle or extreme."

"Asch found that fewer than 25 per cent of participants resisted conforming their reported perception to those of the group on at least some of the trials. However, there were differences: some individuals always conform to the decisions of the group, whereas others would conform only some of the time. Asch's research on conformity to group pressure had a significant impact on the field of group dynamics and anticipated Milgram's and Zimbardo's research on obedience. In this respect Milgram's work was a conscious continuation of the study of conformity pioneered by Asch."

"A pioneering social psychologist who studied how peer pressure shapes human behavior but believed that most people act decently when they are not shackled by ignorance … Dr. Asch's early experiments on compliance — the effects of social pressure on one's perception and interpretation of the world, and on how one forms impressions of others — are widely recognized as among the century's seminal studies in social psychology. … Prof. Henry Gleitman of the University of Pennsylvania's psychology department said Dr. Asch was a man who understood better than most how individuals can do regrettable things in the desire to get along but who nonetheless thought that "people would behave humanely, morally, if appropriately informed.""

"Solomon Asch's studies of independence and conformity are among the most significant in the history of psychology. They are models of rigorous analysis of a socially relevant question based on a well-controlled research design."

"Most social acts have to be understood in their setting, and lose meaning if isolated. No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function."

"There is an inescapable moral dimensions of human existence. It follows that investigation must take account of that proposition. Yet psychologists have been among the most determined opponents of this claim, predictably in the name of what they deem to be science. They hope, at least in their technical activities, to be above the fray."

"I judge Asch to be an antifoundationalist. While the perceptions of the individual knower are to be respected, they are not infallible, but instead are context dependent, relative to a frame of reference. … If we are to be rationally authentic to our experienced purposes, we must retain the goal of knowing how the world is in a way that is the independent of our particular vantage point and limited frame of reference. In this regard, all consensus processes are not equivalent. Some of them, as found in science working at its best, can be seen to be rationally more likely to improve the validity of resulting beliefs. These are the ones that follow the Aschian epistemological morality. Consensus achieved where consensus itself has been the ultimate goal must be sharply distinguished from consensus discovered in the collaborative search for truth."

"ÉIRE (translation)"

"TYM BARDZIEJ"

"THE MORE (translation)"

"If the car drives in the wrong direction better fuel won't help."

"Socialists try to convince us that the tea becomes sweet not because of sugar, but because of mixing."

"The average intelligence quotient of Australian aborigines is more or less equal to a child with Down syndrome, and no one thinks to do abortions on Aborigines."

"A monkey is a much better voter than a socialist. Statistically speaking, if we assume that there are two options to choose from: the "A" and the "B" - the monkey is voting randomly, so its wrong 50% of the time. The socialist, however - is always wrong."

"[Conservatism is] a fight for keeping these qualities that made us move unceasingly."

"I am for joining a free trade zone. The European Union is not such zone, but a zone of raging bureaucracy which stears every hectolitre of wine, and every tone of beef."

"Let's be straight, anarchist demanding state-sponsored welfare would be akin to a Catholic demanding right to rape the Mary, mother of Jesus."

"My principal aim is to destroy socialism."

"Democracy means that if this man, you, and I will be trapped on an island, we having a majority of votes will decide that you have to sleep with us. That's the Democracy. And with 2/3 votes we can even put that in the constitution."

"Under Hitler or Stalin a Góral [Tatra-highlander] could choose to produce oscypek [smoked cheese] however he preferred. Nowadays the EU official is watching him."

"We are not for making shoes, so shoemakers can have jobs, but so we can have shoes."

"If every other Jew had a weapon in 1939, the Holocaust might have been prevented."

"A jump from the sixth floor is definitely more harmful than taking heroin, yet we don't forbid building sixth floors."