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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.

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
Subjected
Firsts
Possible
Deeper
Atheistic
Everything
Term
Civilization
Airport
First
Purpose
Meaning
Whether
Sitting
Alaska
Lost
Short
Embracing
Sense
Gets
Airports
Hong
Tell
Quite
Hotel
Kong
Cannot
Situation
Global

More quotes by Vaclav Havel

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Hope is the deep orientation of the human soul that can be held at the darkest times.
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Follow the man who seeks the truth run from the man who has found it.
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If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.
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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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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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The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension.
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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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People who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being.
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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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There is only one Art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth.
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There's a dilemma over how to balance concrete economic interests with critical opinions on the state of human rights. It's the human rights that suffer, and that's a great price to pay.
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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 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.
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We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly impossible to become a reality.
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This is a confusing and uncertain period, when a thousand wise words can go completely unnoticed, and one thoughtless word can provoke an utterly nonsensical furor.
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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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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 law is only one of several imperfect and more or less external ways of defending what is better in life against what is worse. By itself, the law can never create anything better. Establishing respect for the law does not automatically ensure a better life for that, after all, is a job for people and not for laws and institutions.
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Speaking about myself, I've been pleasantly surprised that my older plays are still being performed. Most important is that they still have something to say to today's audience, in particular the young people who enjoy my plays. That's the best I could hope for, that the plays aren't single-use products of one era.
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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