Vaclav Havel Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity.

  Vaclav Havel

  Hope, Hero, Giving

  "Vaclav Havel Dead: The Quotes Of The Man Who 'Lived In Truth'" by Paul Vale, www.huffingtonpost.co.uk. December 18, 2011.

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• If by believing you mean praying to an anthropomorphic deity who created the world and half controls it and half observes it, then I am probably not a believer. But if you mean that it is not all accidental, that there is a mystery to existence, a deeper meaning, that I do believe in.

  Vaclav Havel

  Believe, Mean, Half

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• The cliché organizes life; it expropriates people's identity; it becomes ruler, defense lawyer, judge, and the law.

  Vaclav Havel

  Law, People, Judging

  "Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvížďala". Book by Václav Havel, translated by Paul Wilson. Chapter 5: "The Politics of Hope", 1990.

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• Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning.

  Vaclav Havel

  Feelings, Ends, Certainty

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• The question is wholly other, deeper and equally relevant to all: whether we shall, by whatever means, succeed in reconstituting the natural world as the true terrain of politics, rehabilitating the personal experience of human beings as the initial measure of things, placing morality above politics and responsibility above our desires, in making human community meaningful, in returning content to human speech, in reconstituting, as the focus of all social action, the autonomous, integral, and dignified human "I."

  Vaclav Havel

  Meaningful, Responsibility, Focus

  "Vaclav Havel's Dissident Criticism" by Peter Lawler, bigthink.com.

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• It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to that automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they too are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in post-totalitarian societies.

  Vaclav Havel

  Civilization, People, Democracy

  Vaclav Havel, John Keane (2016). “The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central Eastern Europe: Citizens Against the State in Central Eastern Europe”, p.105, Routledge

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• It's not hard to stand behind one's successes. But to accept responsibility for one's failures... that is devishly hard!

  Vaclav Havel

  Failure, Responsibility, Accepting

  "Václav Havel: Heir to a Spiritual Legacy". "The Christian Century" Magazine, April 11, 1990.

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• The hope of the world lies in the rehabilitation of the living human being, not just the body but also the soul.

  Vaclav Havel

  Hope, Lying, Soul

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• Hope is a feeling that life and work have meaning. You either have it or you don't, regardless of the state of the world that surrounds you.

  Vaclav Havel

  Hope, Hero, Feelings

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• If a single writer in a country is in chains, then there are some links of that chain that binds us all.

  Vaclav Havel

  Country, Chains That Bind, Links

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• If every day a man takes orders in silence from an incompetent superior, if every day he solemnly performs ritual acts which he privately finds ridiculous, if he unhesitatingly gives answers to questionnaires which are contrary to his real opinions and is prepared to deny his own self in public, if he sees no difficulty in feigning sympathy or even affection where, in fact, he feels only indifference or aversion, it still does not mean that he has entirely lost the use of one of the basic human senses, namely, the sense of humiliation.

  Vaclav Havel

  Sad, Sympathy, Real

  Open letter to Dr. Gustáv Husák, Communist President, April 8, 1975.

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• Self-confidence is not pride. Just the contrary: only a person or a nation that is self-confident, in the best sense of the word, is capable of listening to others, accepting them as equals, forgiving its enemies and regretting its own guilt.

  Vaclav Havel

  Regret, Self Confidence, Pride

  New Year's Address to the Nation, Prague, January 01, 1990.

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• Planetary democracy does not yet exist but our global civilization is already preparing a place for it. It is the very Earth we inhabit linked with Heaven above us. Only in this setting can the mutuality and the commonality of the human race be newly created with reverence and gratitude for that which transcends each of us and all of us together.

  Vaclav Havel

  Gratitude, Race, Civilization

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• The only lost cause is one we give up on before we enter the struggle.

  Vaclav Havel

  Giving Up, Struggle, Causes

  "From Prisoner to President - A Tribute". Amnesty International essay,

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• Hope is the deep orientation of the human soul that can be held at the darkest times.

  Vaclav Havel

  Soul, Humans, Darkest Times

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• As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.

  Vaclav Havel

  Humility, Men, World

  "Disturbing the Peace". Book by Vaclav Havel, 1986.

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• I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than 10 military divisions.

  Vaclav Havel

  Military, Hero, Creativity

  "Critic's Notebook; The Writers Who Shook a Government" by Michiko Kakutani, www.nytimes.com. February 8, 1990.

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• Every consession gives rise to further concessions, we cannot back down, because behind us there is only an abyss, we must keep our promises and demand that they be kept.

  Vaclav Havel

  Giving, Promise, Demand

  "Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvížďala". Book by Václav Havel, translated by Paul Wilson. Chapter 5: "The Politics of Hope", p. 110, 1990.

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• The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance.

  Vaclav Havel

  Distance, Laughing, Perspective

  "War Through a Poet's Lens" by Donald P. Kommers, www.americamagazine.org. April 22, 2000.

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• The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public, he offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin - and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost.

  Vaclav Havel

  Truth, Power, Office

  "Living in Truth". Book by Vaclav Havel, 1986.

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• There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.

  Vaclav Havel

  Hero, Winning, Intelligent

  Disturbing the Peace ch. 5 (1986) (translation by Paul Wilson)

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• Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.

  Vaclav Havel

  Life, Struggle, Hero

  Open letter to Dr. Gustáv Husák, Communist President, April 08, 1975.

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• I have found that good taste, oddly enough, plays an important role in politics. Why is it like that? The most probable reason is that good taste is a visible manifestation of human sensibility toward the world, environment, people.

  Vaclav Havel

  Play, People, Important

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• If the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man.

  Vaclav Havel

  Men, World, Change For The Better

  "Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala". Book by Vaclav Havel translated by Paul Wilson (Chapter 1: Growing Up "Outside", p. 11), 1990.

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• The experience I'm talking about has given me one certainty: the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in human consciousness, nothing will change for the better, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed will be unavoidable.

  Vaclav Havel

  Lying, Heart, Responsibility

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