Vaclav 4 Quotes & Sayings

As in everything else, I must start with myself. That is: in all circumstances try to be decent, just, tolerant, and understanding, and at the same time try to resist corruption and deception. In other words, I must do my utmost to act in harmony with my conscience and my better self. — Vaclav Havel

Vaclav Havel was the most amazing man in terms of being the combination of somebody with massive moral authority, great courage for having espoused the concepts of democracy, freedom throughout a very difficult communist period, a very modest man, and somebody with a fabulous sense of humor and the idea of being able to see the absurd in situations. — Judy Woodruff

What's certain is that a totalitarian enclave like Cuba's can't continue to exist, so change will definitely come there, eventually. — Vaclav Havel

We must come to understand the deep mutual connection or kinship between the various forms of our spirituality. We must recollect our original spiritual and moral substance, which grew out of the same essential experience of humanity. I believe that this is the only way to achieve a genuine renewal of our sense of responsibility for ourselves and for the world. And at the same time, it is the only way to achieve a deeper understanding among cultures that will enable them to work together in a truly ecumenical way to create a new order for the world. — Vaclav Havel

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

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

Other top-level politicians do not express their global warming doubts because a whip of political correctness strangles their voice. — Vaclav Klaus

Man is in fact nailed down - like Christ on the Cross - to a grid of paradoxes ... he balances between the torment of not knowing his mission and the joy of carrying it out, between nothingness and meaningfulness. And like Christ, he is in fact victorious by virtue of his defeats. — Vaclav Havel

I would count myself as a friend of Vaclav Havel. — Tom Stoppard

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

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

The salvation of the world lies in the human heart. — Vaclav Havel

Time and time again I have been persuaded that a huge potential of goodwill is slumbering within our society. It's just that it's incoherent, suppressed, confused, crippled and perplexed. — Vaclav Havel

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side. — Vaclav Havel

Evil must be confronted in its womb and, if it can't be done otherwise, then it has to be dealt with by the use of force. — Vaclav Havel

The attempts to command the climate and decide about the temperature on our planet are wrong and arrogant. I wrote a book about it which was published in English under the title 'Blue Planet in Green Shackles.' — Vaclav Klaus

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

Ultimately, power only really listens to power, and if government is to be improved, we must be able to threaten its existence, not merely its reputation. — Vaclav Havel

In my opinion, theater shouldn't give advice to citizens. — Vaclav Havel

All human suffering concerns each human being — Vaclav Havel

English is the 'language of liberty' for nations emerging from years of cultural oppression. — Vaclav Havel

Nothing is more powerful than individuals acting out of their own conscience. — Vaclav Havel

The law is only one of several imperfect and more or less external ways of defending what is better in life against what is worse. By itself, the law can never create anything better. Establishing respect for the law does not automatically ensure a better life for that, after all, is a job for people and not for laws and institutions. — Vaclav Havel

You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near it. — Vaclav Havel

The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility. — Vaclav Havel

When we, in the communist countries, came across the ideas of Hayek and Aron, we had no problems to understand their importance. They gave us the much needed explanation of the somewhat peculiar prominence of intellectuals in our own society of that time. Our intellectuals, of course, did not like to hear it and did not want to recognize it because their peculiar prominence coexisted with the very debilitating absence of intellectual freedom, which the intellectuals value very highly. — Vaclav Klaus

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

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought. — Vaclav Havel

Those who rebelled against totalitarian rule and those who simply managed to remain themselves and think freely, were all persecuted. We should not forget any of those who paid for our present freedom in one way or another. — Vaclav Havel

You get up and, first thing in the morning, you do your 500 words. Do it every day and you've got a book in eight or nine months. — Vaclav Smil