Vaclav Havel
Czech statesman, writer and former dissident
Lived from: 1936 - 2011
Category: Politics | Writers (Contemporary) Country: 
Czech Republic
Born: 5 october 1936 Died: 18 december 2011
Quotes 1 till 20 of 22.
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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 -
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 -
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 -
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 you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.
― 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 -
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 -
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
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