Quote

But if I were to say who influenced me most, then I'd say Franz Kafka. And his works were always anchored in the Central European region.

Vaclav Havel

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Always
Kafka
Anchored
Region
Influenced
Regions
European
Central
Works
Franz

More quotes by Vaclav Havel

Image
It lies in human nature that where you experience your first laughs, you also remember the age kindly.
Vaclav Havel
Image
To serve grand ideas with a major work is not bad, nor is it all there's to art.
Vaclav Havel
Image
If by believing you mean praying to an anthropomorphic deity who created the world and half controls it and half observes it, then I am probably not a believer. But if you mean that it is not all accidental, that there is a mystery to existence, a deeper meaning, that I do believe in.
Vaclav Havel
Image
Courage means going against majority opinion in the name of the truth.
Vaclav Havel
Image
I have found that good taste, oddly enough, plays an important role in politics. Why is it like that? The most probable reason is that good taste is a visible manifestation of human sensibility toward the world, environment, people.
Vaclav Havel
Image
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 imposition. It was often their leaders who did so.
Vaclav Havel
Image
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.
Vaclav Havel
Image
There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.
Vaclav Havel
Image
Our social and economic statistics are telling us what we already know in our hearts: we have created a world that works for only a few. To change this, we must learn to act toward each other and our environment in profoundly different ways.
Vaclav Havel
Image
Self-confidence is not pride. Just the contrary: only a person or a nation that is self-confident, in the best sense of the word, is capable of listening to others, accepting them as equals, forgiving its enemies and regretting its own guilt.
Vaclav Havel
Image
Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Vaclav Havel
Image
Frank Zappa was one of the gods of the Czech underground, I thought of him as a friend. Whenever I feel like escaping from the world of the Presidency, I think of him.
Vaclav Havel
Image
There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them.
Vaclav Havel
Image
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.
Vaclav Havel
Image
We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.
Vaclav Havel
Image
Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness a more humane society will not emerge.
Vaclav Havel
Image
Modern science kills God and takes his place on the vacant throne. Science is the sole legitimate arbiter of all relavent truth.
Vaclav Havel
Image
People have passed through a very dark tunnel at the end of which there was a light of freedom. Unexpectedly they passed through the prison gates and found themselves in a square. They are now free and they don't know where to go.
Vaclav Havel
Image
Human rights, human freedoms... and human dignity have their deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world... while the state is a human creation, human beings are the creation of God.
Vaclav Havel
Image
It is not enough to invent new machines, new regulations, or new institutions. We must understand differently and more perfectly the true purpose of our existence on this earth.
Vaclav Havel