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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.

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
Merely
Existence
Power
Government
Listens
Able
Threaten
Must
Improved
Really
Reputation
Ultimately

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You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near 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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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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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.
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There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.
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Nothing is more powerful than individuals acting out of their own conscience.
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I am convinced that we will never build a democratic state based on rule of law if we do not at the same time build a state that is-regardless of how unscientific this may sound to the ears of a political scientist-humane, moral, intellectual and spiritual, and cultural.
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Communism was overthrown by life, by thought, by dignity.
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It seems to me that one of the most basic human experiences, one that is genuinely universal and unites-or, more precisely, could unite-all of humanity, is the experience of transcendence in the broadest sense of the word.
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Hope is not a feeling. It is not the belief that things will turn out well, but the conviction that what you are doing makes sense, no matter how things turn out.
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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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Ownership is not a vice, not something to be ashamed of, but rather a commitment, and an instrument by which the general good can be served.
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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 is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.
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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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Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations.
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This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique... something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.
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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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To serve grand ideas with a major work is not bad, nor is it all there's to art.
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The real test of a man is not when he plays the role that he wants for himself but when he plays the role destiny has for him.
Vaclav Havel