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The real test of a man is not when he plays the role that he wants for himself but when he plays the role destiny has for him.

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
Wants
Play
Real
Plays
Men
Test
Tests
Destiny
Role
Roles

More quotes by Vaclav Havel

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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.
Vaclav Havel
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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
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Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have - by disrupting that order - a way of surprising.
Vaclav Havel
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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
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Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity.
Vaclav Havel
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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.
Vaclav Havel
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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
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A genuinely fundamental and hopeful improvement in systems cannot happen without a significant shift in human consciousness.
Vaclav Havel
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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
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People, your Government has returned to you!
Vaclav Havel
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I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than 10 military divisions.
Vaclav Havel
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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
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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.
Vaclav Havel
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By perceiving ourselves as part of the river, we take responsibility for the river as a whole.
Vaclav Havel
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Hope is the deep orientation of the human soul that can be held at the darkest times.
Vaclav Havel
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The only salvation of the world today... is the rapid dissemination of the basic values of the West, that is, the ideas of democracy, human rights, the civil society, and the free market.
Vaclav Havel
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Truth is not merely what we are thinking, but also why, to whom and under what circumstances we say it.
Vaclav Havel
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Those who rebelled against totalitarian rule and those who simply managed to remain themselves and think freely, were all persecuted. We should not forget any of those who paid for our present freedom in one way or another.
Vaclav Havel
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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
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Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.
Vaclav Havel