Fatherhood Quote by Aleksander Kwasniewski

Kwasniewski is doing the statesman’s balancing act: affirming a liberal principle while quietly warning that it can be misused as an alibi. The opening line plants a moral flag in familiar democratic ground - individual responsibility, due process, the rejection of hereditary guilt. In post-communist Europe, that’s not abstract; it’s a direct response to the temptations of collective punishment after regime change, when “who your father was” can become a shortcut for justice.

Then he pivots with a question that destabilizes the comfort he’s just offered. “The sons do not inherit the sins of the fathers” is clean, almost juridical. “But can we say: that was long ago, they were different?” reintroduces history through the side door. The subtext is that innocence in law doesn’t erase continuity in culture, institutions, and benefit. Even if you can’t prosecute descendants, you can’t pretend the past is sealed off if the structures it built still shape the present.

The quote’s tension is its point: it refuses both revenge politics and memory erasure. Kwasniewski, a Polish politician with roots in the communist-era establishment who later steered a democratic state toward the EU, also speaks with personal stakes. He’s defending a politics that can admit historical wrongdoing without turning it into a permanent blood debt - while pressing his audience to drop the lazy escape hatch of “different times” when confronted with lingering legacies, from political violence to antisemitism to authoritarian habits.