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

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
Hero
Intellectual
Side
Sides
Winning
Suspect
Something
Suspects
Always
Winner
Intelligent

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The only lost cause is one we give up on before we enter the struggle.
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This is a confusing and uncertain period, when a thousand wise words can go completely unnoticed, and one thoughtless word can provoke an utterly nonsensical furor.
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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.
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Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations.
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I have read somewhere that in a totalitarian system martyrdom does better than thought.
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Follow the man who seeks the truth run from the man who has found it.
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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.
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It's not true that you should first think up an idea for a better world and only then put it into practice, but, rather, through the fact of your existence in the world, you create the idea or manifest it - create it, as it were, from the material of the world, articulate it in the language of the world.
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It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs.
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It seems to me that one of the most basic human experiences, one that is genuinely universal and unites-or, more precisely, could unite-all of humanity, is the experience of transcendence in the broadest sense of the word.
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Lying can never save us from another lie.
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I am convinced that we will never build a democratic state based on rule of law if we do not at the same time build a state that is-regardless of how unscientific this may sound to the ears of a political scientist-humane, moral, intellectual and spiritual, and cultural.
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Evil must be confronted in its womb, and, if it can't be done otherwise, then it has to be dealt with by the use of force.
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Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.
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The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and ... often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
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The hope of the world lies in the rehabilitation of the living human being, not just the body but also the soul.
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To serve grand ideas with a major work is not bad, nor is it all there's to art.
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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.
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We are the first atheistic and global, all-embracing civilization. You cannot tell whether you are sitting at an airport in Hong Kong or in a hotel in Alaska. Everything is instrumentalized, subjected to a short-term purpose. It is quite possible that in such a situation any sense of a deeper meaning gets lost.
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True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?
Vaclav Havel