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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.

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
Rights
Suffer
State
Interests
Suffering
Price
Interest
Critical
States
Balance
Human
Pay
Dilemma
Humans
Economic
Concrete
Great
Opinion
Opinions

More quotes by 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 are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.
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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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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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But if I were to say who influenced me most, then I'd say Franz Kafka. And his works were always anchored in the Central European region.
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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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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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The world is not divided into two types of being, one superior and the other merely surrounding it. Being, nature, the universe - they are all one infinitely complex and mysterious metaorganism of which we are but a part, though a unique one.
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Follow the man who seeks the truth run from the man who has found it.
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Courage means going against majority opinion in the name of the truth.
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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.
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Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.
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I am not an optimist, because I am not sure that everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist, because I am not sure that everything ends badly. I just carry hope in my heart.
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The Declaration of Independence states that the Creator gave man the right to liberty. It seems man can realize that liberty only if he does not forget the One who endowed him with it.
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Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations.
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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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A genuinely fundamental and hopeful improvement in systems cannot happen without a significant shift in human consciousness.
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The only lost cause is one we give up on before we enter the struggle.
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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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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.
Vaclav Havel