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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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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
Without
Fundamentals
Significant
Consciousness
Genuinely
Happen
Shift
Happens
Hopeful
Cannot
Systems
Human
Improvement
Humans
Fundamental

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Courage means going against majority opinion in the name of the truth.
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Sober perseverance is more effective than enthusiastic emotions, which are all too capable of being transferred, with little difficulty, to something different each day.
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If the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man.
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Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness a more humane society will not emerge.
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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.
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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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The award is destined for scientists who do not fear to touch on some of the darkest aspects of being without betraying what they have achieved. On the contrary, they head in this direction.
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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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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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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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True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?
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The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and ... often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
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There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.
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To serve grand ideas with a major work is not bad, nor is it all there's to art.
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Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.
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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.
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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.
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Hope is a feeling that life and work have meaning. You either have it or you don't, regardless of the state of the world that surrounds you.
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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.
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We live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.
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