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

More quotes by 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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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.
Vaclav Havel
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The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.
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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Man is in fact nailed down - like Christ on the Cross - to a grid of paradoxes. He balances between the torment of not knowing his mission and the joy of carrying it out, between nothingness and meaningfulness. And like Christ, he is in fact victorious by virtue of his defeats.
Vaclav Havel
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Self-confidence is not pride. Just the contrary: only a person or a nation that is self-confident, in the best sense of the word, is capable of listening to others, accepting them as equals, forgiving its enemies and regretting its own guilt.
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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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
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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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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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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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By perceiving ourselves as part of the river, we take responsibility for the river as a whole.
Vaclav Havel
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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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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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When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.
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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Either we have hope within us or we don't It is a dimension of the soul, and is not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the World or observation of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.
Vaclav Havel
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There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them. Besides, to distrust words, and indict them for the horrors that might slumber unobtrusively within them - isn’t this, after all, the true vocation of the intellectual?
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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To serve grand ideas with a major work is not bad, nor is it all there's to art.
Vaclav Havel