Quote

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

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
Intelligent
Hero
Intellectual
Side
Sides
Winning
Suspect
Something
Suspects
Always
Winner

More quotes by Vaclav Havel

Image
Let us admit that most of us writers feel an essential aversion to politics. By taking such a position, however, we accept the perverted principle of specialization, according to which some are paid to write about the horrors of the world and human responsibility and others to deal with those horrors and bear the human responsibility for them.
Vaclav Havel
Image
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.
Vaclav Havel
Image
If a single writer in a country is in chains, then there are some links of that chain that binds us all.
Vaclav Havel
Image
Ownership is not a vice, not something to be ashamed of, but rather a commitment, and an instrument by which the general good can be served.
Vaclav Havel
Image
Truth is not merely what we are thinking, but also why, to whom and under what circumstances we say it.
Vaclav Havel
Image
In my opinion, theater shouldn't give advice to citizens.
Vaclav Havel
Image
There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them.
Vaclav Havel
Image
The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.
Vaclav Havel
Image
Keep the company of those who seek the truth- run from those who have found it
Vaclav Havel
Image
English is the 'language of liberty' for nations emerging from years of cultural oppression.
Vaclav Havel
Image
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.
Vaclav Havel
Image
Responsibility is something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where, and only where, they will be properly judged.
Vaclav Havel
Image
Sober perseverance is more effective than enthusiastic emotions, which are all too capable of being transferred, with little difficulty, to something different each day.
Vaclav Havel
Image
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.
Vaclav Havel
Image
We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly impossible to become a reality.
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
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.
Vaclav Havel
Image
Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.
Vaclav Havel
Image
If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.
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