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Quotes 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.
– Vaclav Havel
Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.
– 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.
– Vaclav Havel
Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have - by disrupting that order - a way of surprising.
– 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.
– 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.
– 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
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
I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.
– Vaclav Havel
If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.
– Vaclav Havel
If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.
– 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.
– 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.
– Vaclav Havel
Lying can never save us from another lie.
– 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.
– 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.
– 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
Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.
– 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.
– Vaclav Havel
The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.
– 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
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
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
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
There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.
– Vaclav Havel
True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?
– 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
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.
– Vaclav Havel
When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.
– Vaclav Havel
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
It lies in human nature that where you experience your first laughs, you also remember the age kindly.
– Vaclav Havel
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