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Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.
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
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Praha
Vaclav Havel
Something
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Goodness
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Succeed
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More quotes by Vaclav Havel
To serve grand ideas with a major work is not bad, nor is it all there's to art.
Vaclav Havel
As in everything else, I must start with myself. That is: in all circumstances try to be decent, just, tolerant, and understanding, and at the same time try to resist corruption and deception. In other words, I must do my utmost to act in harmony with my conscience and my better self.
Vaclav Havel
I do think Russian foreign policy is very savvy. There's a need for great caution because the Russians are able to discreetly blackmail countries.
Vaclav Havel
Follow the man who seeks the truth run from the man who has found it.
Vaclav Havel
True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?
Vaclav Havel
A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clearsighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.
Vaclav Havel
Lying can never save us from another lie.
Vaclav Havel
If I have accomplished anything good, then it's mainly because I've been driven by the need to know whether I can accomplish things I'm not sure I have the capacity for.
Vaclav Havel
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
Planetary democracy does not yet exist but our global civilization is already preparing a place for it. It is the very Earth we inhabit linked with Heaven above us. Only in this setting can the mutuality and the commonality of the human race be newly created with reverence and gratitude for that which transcends each of us and all of us together.
Vaclav Havel
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
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
It's not hard to stand behind one's successes. But to accept responsibility for one's failures... that is devishly hard!
Vaclav Havel
By perceiving ourselves as part of the river, we take responsibility for the river as a whole.
Vaclav Havel
Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.
Vaclav Havel
The cliché organizes life it expropriates people's identity it becomes ruler, defense lawyer, judge, and the law.
Vaclav Havel
Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness a more humane society will not emerge.
Vaclav Havel
I cannot imagine that I could strive for something if I did not carry hope in me.
Vaclav Havel
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and ... often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
Vaclav Havel
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
