Quote

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.

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
Better
Whole
Something
Criticizing
Life
Criticize
Near
Refuse
Spend
Chance

More quotes by 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
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.
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
When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.
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
Hope is not a feeling. It is not the belief that things will turn out well, but the conviction that what you are doing makes sense, no matter how things turn out.
Vaclav Havel
Image
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
Image
None of us know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events.
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
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.
Vaclav Havel
Image
Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.
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
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.
Vaclav Havel
Image
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.
Vaclav Havel
Image
I personally think President [Hosni] Mubarak, who's done a lot for Egypt, should acknowledge that his time has come and step down right away.
Vaclav Havel
Image
I have read somewhere that in a totalitarian system martyrdom does better than thought.
Vaclav Havel
Image
Those that say that individuals are not capable of changing anything are only looking for excuses.
Vaclav Havel
Image
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.
Vaclav Havel
Image
True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?
Vaclav Havel
Image
The only lost cause is one we give up on before we enter the struggle.
Vaclav Havel