Vaclav Havel Quotes

A genuinely fundamental and hopeful improvement in "systems" cannot happen without a significant shift in human consciousness.

Ultimately, power only really listens to power, and if government is to be improved, we must be able to threaten its existence, not merely its reputation.

There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.

Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have - by disrupting that order - a way of surprising.

It was never the people who complained of the universality of human rights, nor did the people consider human rights as a Western or Northern imposition. It was often their leaders who did so.

You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near it.

If I have accomplished anything good, then it's mainly because I've been driven by the need to know whether I can accomplish things I'm not sure I have the capacity for.

Whether all is really lost or not depends entirely on whether or not I am lost.

I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.

If one were required to increase the dramatic seriousness of his face in relation to the seriousness of the problems he had to confront, he would quickly petrify and become his own statue.

Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations.

I have read somewhere that in a totalitarian system martyrdom does better than thought.

We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.

The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and ... often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.

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.

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.

I cannot imagine that I could strive for something if I did not carry hope in me.

Truth is not merely what we are thinking, but also why, to whom and under what circumstances we say it.

Sober perseverance is more effective than enthusiastic emotions, which are all too capable of being transferred, with little difficulty, to something different each day.

Communism was overthrown by life, by thought, by dignity.

English is the 'language of liberty' for nations emerging from years of cultural oppression.

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.

If a single writer in a country is in chains, then there are some links of that chain that binds us all.

It's not hard to stand behind one's successes. But to accept responsibility for one's failures... that is devishly hard!

It is not enough to invent new machines, new regulations, or new institutions. We must understand differently and more perfectly the true purpose of our existence on this earth.

The real test of a man is not when he plays the role that he wants for himself but when he plays the role destiny has for him.

President Murabak has been a U.S. ally for decades. He was a guarantor of some degree of peace in the Middle East and has kept a good relationship with the Western world.

I personally think President [Hosni] Mubarak, who's done a lot for Egypt, should acknowledge that his time has come and step down right away.

There's a dilemma over how to balance concrete economic interests with critical opinions on the state of human rights. It's the human rights that suffer, and that's a great price to pay.

Barack Obama is president of a superpower and I'm a citizen of a small state.

The award is destined for scientists who do not fear to touch on some of the darkest aspects of being without betraying what they have achieved. On the contrary, they head in this direction.

What's certain is that a totalitarian enclave like Cuba's can't continue to exist, so change will definitely come there, eventually.

I think its important for one to take a certain distance from oneself.

If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.

Responsibility is something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where, and only where, they will be properly judged.

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.

Evil must be confronted in its womb, and, if it can't be done otherwise, then it has to be dealt with by the use of force.

To serve grand ideas with a major work is not bad, nor is it all there's to art.

Time and time again I have been persuaded that a huge potential of goodwill is slumbering within our society. It's just that it's incoherent, suppressed, confused, crippled and perplexed.

The cliché organizes life; it expropriates people's identity; it becomes ruler, defense lawyer, judge, and the law.

In my opinion, theater shouldn't give advice to citizens.

This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique... something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.

People, your Government has returned to you!

By perceiving ourselves as part of the river, we take responsibility for the river as a whole.

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.

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.