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English is the 'language of liberty' for nations emerging from years of cultural oppression.

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
English
Liberty
Nations
Language
Years
Emerging
Oppression
Cultural

More quotes by 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.
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If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.
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Lying can never save us from another lie.
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The only salvation of the world today... is the rapid dissemination of the basic values of the West, that is, the ideas of democracy, human rights, the civil society, and the free market.
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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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People thought they could explain and conquer nature-yet the outcome is that they destroyed it and disinherited themselves from it.
Vaclav Havel
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When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.
Vaclav Havel
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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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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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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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There appear to be no integrating forces, no unified meaning, no true inner understanding of phenomena in our experience of the world. Experts can explain anything in the objective world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In short, we live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.
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There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.
Vaclav Havel
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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
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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?
Vaclav Havel
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Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness a more humane society will not emerge.
Vaclav Havel
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Those that say that individuals are not capable of changing anything are only looking for excuses.
Vaclav Havel
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The salvation of the world lies in the human heart.
Vaclav Havel
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Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Vaclav Havel
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I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than 10 military divisions.
Vaclav Havel
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The cliché organizes life it expropriates people's identity it becomes ruler, defense lawyer, judge, and the law.
Vaclav Havel