Vaclav Klaus Quotes

By the time I returned to Czechoslovakia, I had an understanding of the principles of the market.

I was paid to read Western economic texts. In a way, the regime paid for their own undermining.

What is concisely referred to as global warming, is a fatal mistake of the present time.

The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity, is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.

You cannot have democratic accountability in anything bigger than a nation state.

"not a scientific body capable of accurately assessing the facts about global warming".

Environmentalism is a dangerous ideology endangering human freedom.

I also helped write the five-page statement of principles that Civic Forum issued in late November. That was the first public expression of what the new government wanted to do.

I don't think there is any global warming. I don't see the statistical data for that.

Then in 1969, I spent the spring term at Cornell University in New York. The invasion of August 1968 had already happened, but the hardline regime took several months to crack down on dissidents.

People like me who were engaging in brinkmanship with the party economic bosses and the open dissidents who were being arrested were pursuing a common goal in different ways.

To talk about planning an economic system is to talk in old terms, and I find myself sometimes having to teach Westerners about what the market really means.

Communism was replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism.

Common foreign policy is completely unnecessary. The various European countries have widely differing priorities, goals and prejudices. It would be wrong to force them all to follow the same course.

EU didn't advance our [Eastern Europe] democracy by a single millimeter.

Other top-level politicians do not express their global warming doubts because a whip of political correctness strangles their voice.

I never intended to be a politician or office-seeker.

It is what makes the reform process an art, not just a science. You have to develop a strategy that tells you what reform measures you should follow and in what sequence.