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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
Role
Roles
Wants
Play
Real
Plays
Men
Test
Tests
Destiny

More quotes by Vaclav Havel

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English is the 'language of liberty' for nations emerging from years of cultural oppression.
Vaclav Havel
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If a single writer in a country is in chains, then there are some links of that chain that binds us all.
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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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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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It lies in human nature that where you experience your first laughs, you also remember the age kindly.
Vaclav Havel
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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
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I cannot imagine that I could strive for something if I did not carry hope in me.
Vaclav Havel
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Without the constantly living and articulated eperience of absurdity, there would be no reason to attempt to do something meaningful. And on the contrary, how can one experience one's own absurdity if one is not constantly seeking meaning?
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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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
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When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.
Vaclav Havel
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President Murabak has been a U.S. ally for decades. He was a guarantor of some degree of peace in the Middle East and has kept a good relationship with the Western world.
Vaclav Havel
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This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique... something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.
Vaclav Havel
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There appear to be no integrating forces, no unified meaning, no true inner understanding of phenomena in our experience of the world. Experts can explain anything in the objective world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In short, we live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.
Vaclav Havel
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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
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The only lost cause is one we give up on before we enter the struggle.
Vaclav Havel
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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.
Vaclav Havel
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Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness a more humane society will not emerge.
Vaclav Havel
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People thought they could explain and conquer nature-yet the outcome is that they destroyed it and disinherited themselves from it.
Vaclav Havel
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All human suffering concerns each human being.
Vaclav Havel