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Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.

Vaclav Havel

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Vaclav Havel
Age: 75 †
Born: 1936
Born: October 5
Died: 2011
Died: December 18
Director
Dissident
Essayist
Film Director
Human Rights Activist
Leader
Playwright
Poet
Politician
Writer
Praha
Vaclav Havel
Aren
Meaning
Suicides
Wonder
Guardians
Fact
Suicidal
Facts
Guardian
Sometimes
Heroic
Life
Suicide
Hero

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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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It's not hard to stand behind one's successes. But to accept responsibility for one's failures... that is devishly hard!
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I think its important for one to take a certain distance from oneself.
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Genuine politics -- even politics worthy of the name -- 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. Its deepest roots are moral because it is a responsibility expressed through action, to and for the whole.
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The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension.
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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. By itself, the law can never create anything better. Establishing respect for the law does not automatically ensure a better life for that, after all, is a job for people and not for laws and institutions.
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I am in favor of [actions] that have authenticity, roots, originality, verve, balance, taste, communicativeness, challenge, relevance to their time-in short, things that make sense.
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Modern science kills God and takes his place on the vacant throne. Science is the sole legitimate arbiter of all relavent truth.
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By perceiving ourselves as part of the river, we take responsibility for the river as a whole.
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We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly impossible to become a reality.
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Without commonly shared and widely entrenched moral values and obligations, neither the law, nor democratic government, nor even the market economy will function properly.
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You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near it.
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Barack Obama is president of a superpower and I'm a citizen of a small state.
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Ultimately, power only really listens to power, and if government is to be improved, we must be able to threaten its existence, not merely its reputation.
Vaclav Havel
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If the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man.
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Man is in fact nailed down - like Christ on the Cross - to a grid of paradoxes. He balances between the torment of not knowing his mission and the joy of carrying it out, between nothingness and meaningfulness. And like Christ, he is in fact victorious by virtue of his defeats.
Vaclav Havel
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Lying can never save us from another lie.
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I am not sure one is capable of reflecting absurdity without having a strong sense of meaning. Absurdity makes sense only against a meaningful background. It is the deeper meaning that is shedding light on the absurdity. There must be a vanish point, a metaphysical horizon if you will where absurdity and meaning merge.
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Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.
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Every consession gives rise to further concessions, we cannot back down, because behind us there is only an abyss, we must keep our promises and demand that they be kept.
Vaclav Havel