Famous Václav Havel Quotations

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"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good."
by Vaclav Havel
"The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it."
by Vaclav Havel
"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."
by Václav Havel
"A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear-sighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action."
by Vaclav Havel
"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."
by Vaclav Havel
"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for .success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good."
by Vaclav Havel
"Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people's own failure as individuals."
by Vaclav Havel
"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..."
by Vaclav Havel
"Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it."
by Vaclav Havel
"Society is a complex and mysterious creation and . it's extremely imprudent to believe in the fact it presents you with at a given moment, let alone to consider it the one and only true face."
by Vaclav Havel
"The truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why and how it is said."
by Vaclav Havel
"The truth is not simply what you think it is it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why and how it is said."
by Vaclav Havel
"A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear-sighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerally of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action."
by Vaclav Havel
"Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it."
by Vaclav Havel
"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."
by Vaclav Havel
"Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary master plan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people's own failure as individuals."
by Vaclav Havel
"There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all."
by Vaclav Havel
"I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions."
by Vaclav Havel
"Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace."
by Vaclav Havel
"It cannot suffice to invent new machines, new regulations, new institutions. It is necessary to change and improve our understanding of the true purpose of what we are and what we do in the world. Only such a new understanding will allow us to develop new models of behavior, new scales of values and goals, and thereby invest the global regulations, treaties and institutions with a new spirit and meaning."
by Vaclav Havel
"The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning -- in other words, of absurdity --the more energetically meaning is sought."
by Vaclav Havel
"There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side."
by Vaclav Havel
"This is a confusing and uncertain period, when a thousand wise words can go completely unnoticed, and one thoughtless word can provoke an utterly nonsensical furor."
by 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."
by Vaclav Havel
"None of us know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events."
by Vaclav Havel
"The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both."
by Vaclav Havel
"Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance."
by Vaclav Havel
"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."
by Vaclav Havel
"A state that denies its citizens their basic rights becomes a danger to its neighbors as well: internal arbitrary rule will be reflected in arbitrary external relations. The suppression of public opinion, the abolition of public competition for power and its public exercise opens the way for the state power to arm itself in any way it sees fit. A state that does not hesitate to lie to its own people will not hesitate to lie to other states."
by 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."
by Vaclav Havel
"I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect."
by Vaclav Havel
"Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have -- by disrupting that order -- a way of surprising."
by Vaclav Havel
"People who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being."
by Vaclav Havel
"Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to prosecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing."
by Vaclav Havel
"The only salvation of the world today... is the rapid dissemination of the basic values of the West, that is, the ideas of democracy, human rights, the civil society, and the free market."
by Vaclav Havel
"The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so ..."
by Václav Havel
"There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which ..."
by Václav Havel


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