Václav Havel (1936–2011) was a Czech playwright, poet, human rights activist, and political dissident. After the fall of communism, he served as president of Czechoslovakia 1989–92 and of the Czech Republic 1993–2003.
Born in Prague, Havel came from a bourgeois family known for its antagonism to the reigning communists. After getting educated at the Academy of Dramatic Art, he began work as a stagehand at the Divadlo Na zábradlí (Theatre on the Balustrade,) becoming a resident writer there 1960–69.
Havel’s work includes Zahradní slavnost (1963; The Garden Party, 1969,) Vyrozumění (1967; The Memorandum,) Spiklenci (1970; The Conspirators,) and Audience (1976; Temptation, 1976.) The Garden Party and The Memorandum used absurdist techniques to analyze totalitarianism, in particular its corrupting effects on language and personal integrity. Following the Soviet-led crackdown of 1968—69, his work was forbidden from the stage for over twenty years.
Havel was one of the founders of Charter 77 in 1977. Deemed subversive, he was frequently arrested, and in 1979 was imprisoned for four and a half years. He was again detained in February 1989 but was released three months later.
In December 1989, after the overthrow of the Czechoslovak Communist Party during the Velvet Revolution, Havel was elected president by direct popular ballot. He supervised the peaceful division of Czechoslovakia into discrete Czech and Slovak states in 1992 and was elected president of the Czech Republic in 1993. He was re-elected in 1998 and stepped down in 2003. He continued to write and speak on human rights and social issues.
Havel’s publications in English translation include The Power of the Powerless (1985,) Selected Plays (1991,) Towards a Civil Society (1994,) and Leaving (2008.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Vaclav Havel
My dear fellow citizens: For forty years you have heard from my predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme: how our country flourished, how many millions of tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you. . . We live in a contaminated moral environment. We have fallen morally ill because we became used to saying one thing and thinking another. We have learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Notions such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness have lost their depth and dimensions. . . The previous regime . . . reduced man to a means of production and nature to a tool of production. Thus it attacked both their very essence and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people to nuts and bolts in some monstrously huge, noisy, and stinking machine.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Oppression
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
Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have—by disrupting that order—a way of surprising.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Theater
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
If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Presidency
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
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
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
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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Tyranny
There’s always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Intelligence, Intellectuals
Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren’t in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Suicide
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
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
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
Topics: Hope
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
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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Tyranny
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: Literature, Books
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
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
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
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
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
We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly impossible to become a reality.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Dream
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
Topics: Slavery
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.
—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
Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Storytelling
I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Theater
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
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
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: Arts, Artists, Art
The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Apathy, Living
The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Authors & Writing
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: Books, Literature
The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning—in other words, of absurdity—the more energetically meaning is sought.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Absence, Discovery
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
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
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
I am not an optimist, because I am not sure that everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist, because I am not sure that everything ends badly. I just carry hope in my heart.
Hope is the feeling that life and work have a meaning. You either have it or you don’t, regardless of the state of the world that surrounds you.
Life without hope is an empty, boring, and useless life. I cannot imagine that I could strive for something if I did not carry hope in me.
I am thankful to God for this gift. It is as big as life itself.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Hope
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: Hope, Work
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