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I am not an optimist, because I am not sure that everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist, because I am not sure that everything ends badly. I just carry hope in my heart.

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
Ends
Wells
Pessimist
Everything
Optimist
Well
Hopeful
Heart
Badly
Carry
Sure
Hope

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning.
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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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I have preserved my identity, put its credibility to the test and defended my dignity. What good this will bring the world I don't know. But for me it is good.
Vaclav Havel
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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
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Courage means going against majority opinion in the name of the truth.
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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.
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Those that say that individuals are not capable of changing anything are only looking for excuses.
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 who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being.
Vaclav Havel
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Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace.
Vaclav Havel
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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
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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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We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.
Vaclav Havel
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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.
Vaclav Havel
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If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.
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.
Vaclav Havel
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Nothing is more powerful than individuals acting out of their own conscience.
Vaclav Havel