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The previous regime ... reduced man to a means of production and nature to a tool of production. Thus it attacked both their very essence and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people to nuts and bolts in some monstrously huge, noisy, and stinking machine.

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
Means
Machines
Regimes
Stinking
Nature
Thus
Gifted
Autonomous
Mean
Tools
Nuts
Bolts
Men
Essence
Tool
Noisy
People
Cold
Mutual
Attacked
Relationship
Production
Regime
Huge
Productions
Reduced
War
Machine
Previous
Monstrously

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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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Whether all is really lost or not depends entirely on whether or not I am lost.
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Responsibility is something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where, and only where, they will be properly judged.
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Without the constantly living and articulated eperience of absurdity, there would be no reason to attempt to do something meaningful. And on the contrary, how can one experience one's own absurdity if one is not constantly seeking meaning?
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The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance.
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Our country, if that is what we want, can now permanently radiate love, understanding, the power of the spirit and of ideas. It is precisely this glow that we can offer as our specific contribution to international politics.
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Our social and economic statistics are telling us what we already know in our hearts: we have created a world that works for only a few. To change this, we must learn to act toward each other and our environment in profoundly different ways.
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Communism was overthrown by life, by thought, by dignity.
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Truth is not merely what we are thinking, but also why, to whom and under what circumstances we say it.
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None of us know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events.
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There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them.
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People, your Government has returned to you!
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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?
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Lying can never save us from another lie.
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The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning...
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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.
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The only lost cause is one we give up on before we enter the struggle.
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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.
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Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have - by disrupting that order - a way of surprising.
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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