Václav Havel

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.

A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clearsighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human.

Genuine politics—politics worthy of the name, and the only politics I am willing to devote myself to—is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community, and serving those who will come after us.

People thought they could explain and conquer nature—yet the outcome is that they destroyed it and disinherited themselves from it.

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

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.

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.

Human rights are universal and indivisible. Human freedom is also indivisible: if it is denied to anyone in the world, it is therefore denied, indirectly, to all people. This is why we cannot remain silent in the face of evil or violence; silence merely encourages them.

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

Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point only then can he look beyond it.

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.

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.

Courage means going against majority opinion in the name of the truth.

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

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.

Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, overtime, gain in political significance.

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.