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I am in favor of [actions] that have authenticity, roots, originality, verve, balance, taste, communicativeness, challenge, relevance to their time-in short, things that make sense.

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
Action
Challenge
Make
Roots
Verve
Things
Short
Relevance
Time
Balance
Authenticity
Taste
Originality
Challenges
Favor
Inspirational
Favors
Sense
Actions

More quotes by 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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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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Evil must be confronted in its womb, and, if it can't be done otherwise, then it has to be dealt with by the use of force.
Vaclav Havel
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Every consession gives rise to further concessions, we cannot back down, because behind us there is only an abyss, we must keep our promises and demand that they be kept.
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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There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.
Vaclav Havel
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Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.
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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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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There's a dilemma over how to balance concrete economic interests with critical opinions on the state of human rights. It's the human rights that suffer, and that's a great price to pay.
Vaclav Havel
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I have read somewhere that in a totalitarian system martyrdom does better than thought.
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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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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The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.
Vaclav Havel
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The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.
Vaclav Havel
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We live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.
Vaclav Havel
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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.
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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People, your Government has returned to you!
Vaclav Havel