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Time and time again I have been persuaded that a huge potential of goodwill is slumbering within our society. It's just that it's incoherent, suppressed, confused, crippled and perplexed.

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
Incoherent
Huge
Perplexed
Within
Suppressed
Society
Persuaded
Time
Crippled
Goodwill
Confused
Slumbering
Potential

More quotes by Vaclav Havel

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If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.
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People, your Government has returned to you!
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English is the 'language of liberty' for nations emerging from years of cultural oppression.
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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.
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We are the first atheistic and global, all-embracing civilization. You cannot tell whether you are sitting at an airport in Hong Kong or in a hotel in Alaska. Everything is instrumentalized, subjected to a short-term purpose. It is quite possible that in such a situation any sense of a deeper meaning gets lost.
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It's not hard to stand behind one's successes. But to accept responsibility for one's failures... that is devishly hard!
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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.
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All human suffering concerns each human being.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Hope is the deep orientation of the human soul that can be held at the darkest times.
Vaclav Havel
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Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity.
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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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There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them.
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Modern science kills God and takes his place on the vacant throne. Science is the sole legitimate arbiter of all relavent truth.
Vaclav Havel
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Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.
Vaclav Havel
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I am not sure one is capable of reflecting absurdity without having a strong sense of meaning. Absurdity makes sense only against a meaningful background. It is the deeper meaning that is shedding light on the absurdity. There must be a vanish point, a metaphysical horizon if you will where absurdity and meaning merge.
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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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Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.
Vaclav Havel