Vaclav Havel Quotes

126 quotes in 1827 categories

• The cliché organizes life; it expropriates people's identity; it becomes ruler, defense lawyer, judge, and the law.
• 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…
• Human rights, human freedoms, and human dignity have their deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world. These values are as powerful as they are because,…
• It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs.
• Either we have hope within us or we don't It is a dimension of the soul, and is not essentially dependent on some particular observation…
• Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.
• When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.
• I am convinced that we will never build a democratic state based on rule of law if we do not at the same time build…
• 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.…
• Truth is not merely what we are thinking, but also why, to whom and under what circumstances we say it.
• We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.
• 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…
• Nothing is more powerful than individuals acting out of their own conscience.
• The world is not divided into two types of being, one superior and the other merely surrounding it. Being, nature, the universe - they are…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.…
• 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…
• 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…
• Our country, if that is what we want, can now permanently radiate love, understanding, the power of the spirit and of ideas. It is precisely…

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