We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly impossible to become a reality.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Dream
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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Value
Without commonly shared and widely entrenched moral values and obligations, neither the law, nor democratic government, nor even the market economy will function properly.
—Vaclav Havel
Hope… is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Work, Hope
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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Protest
Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Humor, Laughter
Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have—by disrupting that order—a way of surprising.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Theater
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.
—Vaclav Havel
I have preserved my identity, put its credibility to the test and defended my dignity. What good this will bring the world I don’t know. But for me it is good.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Identity
I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Theater
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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Artists, Art, Arts
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
Topics: Age
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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Literature, Books
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
Topics: Truth
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Books, Literature
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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Power
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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Language
You do not become a “dissident” just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Dissent
There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them. Besides, to distrust words, and indict them for the horrors that might slumber unobtrusively within them—isn’t this, after all, the true vocation of the intellectual?
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Words
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.
—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.
—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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Independence
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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Action, Awareness
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
Topics: Reason
Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren’t in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Suicide
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
Topics: Lawyers, Law
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.
—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
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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Hope
True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Oppression
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Robertson Davies Canadian Novelist, Playwright
- Nelson Mandela South African Political leader
- David Suzuki Canadian Scientist, Environmental Activist
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- A. S. Byatt English Novelist, Poet
- Seamus Heaney Irish Poet, Playwright
- Muriel Spark Scottish Novelist, Poet
- Margaret Atwood Canadian Author
- Desmond Tutu South African Clergyman
- Barbara Jordan American Educator, Politician
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