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

More quotes by Vaclav Havel

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The truth is not simply what you think it is it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why, and how it is said.
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The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.
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I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I am convinced that we will never build a democratic state based on rule of law if we do not at the same time build a state that is-regardless of how unscientific this may sound to the ears of a political scientist-humane, moral, intellectual and spiritual, and cultural.
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The award is destined for scientists who do not fear to touch on some of the darkest aspects of being without betraying what they have achieved. On the contrary, they head in this direction.
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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.
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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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To serve grand ideas with a major work is not bad, nor is it all there's to art.
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Barack Obama is president of a superpower and I'm a citizen of a small state.
Vaclav Havel
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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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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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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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The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.
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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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
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English is the 'language of liberty' for nations emerging from years of cultural oppression.
Vaclav Havel
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It lies in human nature that where you experience your first laughs, you also remember the age kindly.
Vaclav Havel