Vaclav Havel Quotes

The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.

Keep the company of those who seek the truth- run from those who have found it

Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning.

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

Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.

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.

I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence.

As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.

Truth and love will overcome lies and hatred.

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.

It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs.” —Vaclav Havel

Hope is the deep orientation of the human soul that can be held at the darkest times.

All human suffering concerns each human being

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

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

You do not become a ''dissident'' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.

Man is not an omipotent master of the universe, allowed to do with impunity whatever he thinks, or whatever suits him at the moment. The world we live in is made of an immensely complex and mysterious tissue about which we know very little and which we must treat with utmost humility.

In any case, ideals are something we strive for; they are somewhere on the horizon of our efforts; they provide meaning and direction; they are not, however, static quotas that we either fulfill or do not.

Harapan, kata Vaclav Havel, "bukanlah keyakinan bahwa hal-ikhwal akan berjalan baik, melainkan rasa pasti bahwa ada sesuatu yang bukan hanya omong kosong dalam semua ini, apa pun yang akan terjadi akhirnya".

Lying can never save us from another lie.

The kind of hope that I often think about…I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we don’t. It is a dimension of the soul It’s not essentially dependent upon some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a tundra of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.

The tragic element in modern man, not ignore the meaning of his life, but it bothers him less and less.

L'élément tragique pour l'homme moderne, ce n'est pas qu'il ignore le sens de sa vie, mais que ça le dérange de moins en moins.

Our indifference towards others can after all result in only one thing: the indifference of others towards us. Vaclav Havel, quoted in Havel: A Life

At one time, the state of culture in Czechoslovakia was described, rather poignantly, as a 'Biafra of the spirit'. . . I simply do not believe that we have all lain down and died. I see far more than graves and tombstones around me. I see evidence of this in . . . expensive books on astronomy printed in a hundred thousand copies (they would hardly find that many readers in the USA) . . .

I developed a maturing recognition of the importance of hopefulness in creating justice. I'd started addressing the subject of hopefulness in talks to small groups. I'd grown fond of quoting Vaclav Havel, the great Czech leader who had said that 'hope' was the one thing people struggling in Eastern Europe needed during the era of Soviet domination. The kind of hope that creates a willingness to position oneself in a hopeless place and be a witness, that allows one to believe in a better future, even in the face of abusive power. That kind of hope makes one strong.

In the Cold War, the West celebrated dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and Vaclav Havel, who had the courage to challenge the Soviet system from within. Today, there are many dissidents who challenge Islam – former Muslims, and reformers – but the West either ignores them or dismisses them as “not representative.” This is a grave mistake. Reformers must be supported and protected. They should be as well known as Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and Havel were in the 1980s – and as well known as Locke and Voltaire were their day, when the West needed freethinkers of its own.

I'd grown fond of quoting Václav Havel, the great Czech leader who had said that "hope" was the one thing that people struggling in Eastern Europe needed during the era of Soviet domination. Havel had said that people struggling for independence wanted money and recognition from other countries; they wanted more criticism of the Soviet empire from the West and more diplomatic pressure. But Havel had said that these were things they wanted; the only thing they needed was hope. Not that pie in the sky stuff, not a preference for optimism over pessimism, but rather "an orientation of the spirit." The kind of hope that creates a willingness to position oneself in a hopeless place and be a witness, that allows one to believe in a better future, even in the face of abusive power. That kind of hope makes one strong.

(All the dorms were named after dissidents, freedom fighters, revolutionaries.) “The Vaclav Havel is between the John Brown and the Cesar Chavez. If you get to Michael Collins,” Rowena said, “you’ve gone too far.

You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances….It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.

And anyway, no one ever develops and achieves self-awareness in a vacuum, beyond all eras and systems. The period you grow up in and mature in always influence your thinking. This in itself requires no self-criticism. What is more important is how you have allowed yourself to be influenced, whether by good or evil.

I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.

Again, I call to mind that distant moment in [the prison at] Hermanice when on a hot, cloudless summer day, I sat on a pile of rusty iron and gazed into the crown of an enormous tree that stretched, with dignified repose, up and over all the fences, wires, bars and watchtowers that separated me from it. As I watched the imperceptible trembling of its leaves against an endless sky, I was overcome by a sensation that is difficult to describe: all at once, I seemed to rise above all the coordinates of my momentary existence in the world into a kind of state outside time in which all the beautiful things I had ever seen and experienced existed in a total “co-present”; I felt a sense of reconciliation, indeed of an almost gentle consent to the inevitable course of things as revealed to me now, and this combined with a carefree determination to face what had to be faced. A profound amazement at the sovereignty of Being became a dizzying sensation of tumbling endlessly into the abyss of its mystery; an unbounded joy at being alive, at having been given the chance to live through all I have lived through, and at the fact that everything has a deep and obvious meaning— this joy formed a strange alliance in me with a vague horror at the inapprehensibility and unattainability of everything I was so close to in that moment, standing at the very “edge of the finite”; I was flooded with a sense of ultimate happiness and harmony with the world and with myself, with that moment, with all the moments I could call up, and with everything invisible that lies behind it and has meaning. I would even say that I was somehow “struck by love,” though I don’t know precisely for whom or what.

Vaclav Havel was talking about when he said . . . The relationship to the world that modern science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential. It is increasingly clear that, strangely, the relationship is missing something. It fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality, and with natural human experience. It is now more of a source of disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning. It produces what amounts to a state of schizophrenia, completely alienating man as an observer from himself as a being. Classical modern science described only the surface of things, a single dimension of reality. And the more dogmatically science treated it as the only dimension, as the very essence of reality, the more misleading it became. Today, for instance, we may know immeasurably more about the universe than our ancestors did, yet it increasingly seems that they knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us. The same is true of nature and of ourselves. The more thoroughly all our organs and their functions, their internal structures, and the biochemical reactions that take place within them are described, the more we seem to fail to grasp the spirit, purpose, and meaning of the system that they create together and that we experience as our unique “self.”18

In some ways the soviets simplified who the enemy was”, Havel said, “Today autocrats are more sophisticated, they stand for election while slowly undermining institutions that make democracy possible. They champion free markets while engaging with the same corruption cronyism and exploitation that existed in the past".

According to the FBI, Semtex has an indefinite half-life and is far stronger than traditional explosives such as TNT. It is also easily available on the black market. Semtex became infamous when just 12 ounces of the substance, molded inside a Toshiba cassette recorder, blasted Pan Am flight 103 out of the sky above Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, killing 270 people. A year later, after the Czech Communist regime was toppled, the new president, Vaclav Havel, revealed that the Czechs had exported 900 tons of Semtex to Col. Moammar Qaddafi's Libya and another 1,000 tons to other unstable states such as Syria, North Korea, Iraq, and Iran. Some experts now put worldwide stockpiles of Semtex at 40,000 tons. Brebera says that with so much Semtex already in the hands of terrorists, and similar explosives being produced in other countries, the Czech Republic can no longer control it. "Semtex is no worse an explosive than any other," he says, defensive at the sight of accusatory headlines in Western newspapers. "The American explosive C4 is just as invisible to airport X-rays, but they don't like to mention that." After the Lockerbie tragedy, Brebera added metal components and a distinct odor to make Semtex easier to detect. But that did not stop terrorists from using it to bomb the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1998, or prevent the IRA, which received about 10 tons of Semtex from Libya, from continuing its attacks.

We do not have the tools or the wealth of the state. We cannot beat it at its own game. We cannot ferret out infiltrators. The legal system is almost always on the state’s side. If we attempt to replicate the elaborate security apparatuses of our oppressors, even on a small scale, we unleash paranoia and fracture those who build movements. If we retreat into anonymity, hiding behind masks, then we provide an opening for agents provocateurs who deny their identities while disrupting the movement. If we fight pitched battles in the streets, we give authorities an excuse to fire their weapons and demonize the movement to the public. All we have, as Vaclav Havel wrote, is our powerlessness. And that powerlessness is our strength. The ability of the movement to overthrow the corporate state depends on two of our most important assets—utter and complete transparency, and a rigid adherence to nonviolence, including respect for private property. These assets permit us, as Havel puts it in his classic 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless”, to live in truth. And by living in truth, we expose a corrupt corporate state that perpetuates lies and functions by deceit.

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. Vaclav Havel

Vision is not enough; it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps; we must step up the stairs.” VACLAV HAVEL

Vision is not enough; it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps; we must step up the stairs. —Vaclav Havel

It is an open question whether or not “liberal democracy” in its present form can provide a thought-world of sufficient moral substance to sustain meaningful lives. This is precisely the question that Vaclav Havel, then newly elected as president of Czechoslovakia, posed in an address to the U.S. Congress. “We still don’t know how to put morality ahead of politics, science, and economics,” he said. “We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of our actions—if they are to be moral—is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success.” What Havel is saying is that it is not enough for his nation to liberate itself from one flawed theory; it is necessary to find another, and he worries that Technopoly provides no answer. To

All we have, as Vaclav Havel wrote, is our powerlessness. And that powerlessness is our strength. The ability of the movement to overthrow the corporate state depends on embracing this powerlessness. It depends on two of our most important assets—utter and complete transparency, and a rigid adherence to nonviolence, including respect for private property. These assets permit us, as Havel puts it in his classic 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” to live in truth. And by living in truth, we expose a corrupt corporate state that perpetrates lies and functions by deceit.

Vždy přísně rozlišuji mezi nadějí a optimismem. Optimista je člověk, který si myslí, že vše dopadne co nejlépe. Pesimista si myslí, že vše dopadne co nejhůře. Nevím, jak věci dopadnou. Proto nejsem optimista ani pesimista. Chovám v sobě naději, což je něco jiného než optimismus nebo pesimismus, protože to jsou jakési odhady či prognózy budoucnosti. Naděje je stavem ducha. Je to stav, bez něhož život ztrácí veškerý význam. Pokud chci žít, musím mít naději.

…The salvation of the human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility. Vaclav Havel

Now that we have tons of autobiographical testimony and interviews and archive documents and, most important, now that we can see with our own eyes the "reformers of the 190s" transmogrified into Putin's lickspittles, propagandists, oligarchs, and bureaucrats, and all of them extremely rich, we should be honest, repudiating hypocrisy and any attempt to justify ourselves for our wasted years. We should admit that there never were any democrats in power in Russia, in the sense of people with a genuinely liberal, democratic outlook. And the main narrative of our recent past, the confrontation between "democrats" and Soviet conservatives, never happened either. "What do you mean, never happened? I was part of it!" Even I want to protest in response to such a radical, or naive, or wicked assertion. But it is only too obvious that it never happened, at least not in the way those involved in the events portray it. There was an objective historical process. There was the U.S.S.R., ideologically, economically, and morally bankrupt. There was a conflict between elites, in which one faction, in order to sweep away senile dotards, tricked itself out in more popular colors, those of "democrats and supporters of a market economy." With that slogan it seized power. Well, isn't that just the way of the world? Are you going to accept that one section of the elite came up with new slogans and won, or are you going to go around with a liberalometer checking everybody's ideological purity to find out who most believed in what they were saying and who was less than sincere? Actually, a device of that description would have been very helpful, and the lack of one is exactly why nothing worked out "like in America" or, for that matter, in the Czech Republic. In the countries of the Soviet bloc, those opposing the conservatives, socialists, dodderers, idiots, and saboteurs had as their leaders (or just playing a crucial role) people of the stature of Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel. They had stood their ground in the face of oppression and persecution, and over many years had shown in action a genuine commitment to the words they proclaimed from the podium. In Russia everything was different. The chief "radical democrat" was Boris Yeltisn. I was born in 1976, at which time Yeltisn was the first secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional committee of the CPSU. That is, he was the governor of the largest industrial region in the Urals with powers that were far in excess of today's governors. There he behaved like a typical Soviet petty tyrant, and just as in the mid-1970s he would climb into his official black car, live in his officially provided apartment, and acquire his official elite dacha, so until his death that is the lifestyle he and his family took for granted. He belonged body and soul to the Soviet party establishment, and what little he knew about the life of the "common people" he gleaned from his chauffeurs and servants.