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

More quotes by Vaclav Havel

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Nothing is more powerful than individuals acting out of their own conscience.
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Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations.
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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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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.
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You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near it.
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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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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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The cliché organizes life it expropriates people's identity it becomes ruler, defense lawyer, judge, and the law.
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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.
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As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.
Vaclav Havel
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Human rights, human freedoms... and human dignity have their deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world... while the state is a human creation, human beings are the creation of God.
Vaclav Havel
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I have found that good taste, oddly enough, plays an important role in politics. Why is it like that? The most probable reason is that good taste is a visible manifestation of human sensibility toward the world, environment, people.
Vaclav Havel
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Ultimately, power only really listens to power, and if government is to be improved, we must be able to threaten its existence, not merely its reputation.
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.
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The Declaration of Independence states that the Creator gave man the right to liberty. It seems man can realize that liberty only if he does not forget the One who endowed him with it.
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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If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.
Vaclav Havel
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Courage means going against majority opinion in the name of the truth.
Vaclav Havel
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There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.
Vaclav Havel
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Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.
Vaclav Havel