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

The New Yale Book of Quotations

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A specter is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called “dissent.”

The New Yale Book of Quotations

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I have read somewhere that in a totalitarian system martyrdom does better than thought.
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I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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People thought they could explain and conquer nature—yet the outcome is that they destroyed it and disinherited themselves from it.
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The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and that often, paradoxically, is literature that suffers for it.
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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.
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Václav Havel (1936-2011) was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, human rights activist, and statesman. Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Havel became a prominent figure in the post-war theater scene with his absurdist plays that criticized totalitarianism. He was a key leader in the 1989 "Velvet Revolution," which peacefully overthrew the communist government. Havel served as the last president of Czechoslovakia and, subsequently, as the first president of the Czech Republic. His literary work includes plays such as "The Memorandum" and "The Audience," and his essays, such as "The Power of the Powerless," are influential in political theory and philosophy. He passed away in Hrádeček, Czech Republic.