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As someone who lived under communism for most of my life I feel obliged to say that the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants. Communism was replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism.

Vaclav Klaus

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Vaclav Klaus
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: June 19
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Vaclav Klaus
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More quotes by Vaclav Klaus

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To talk about planning an economic system is to talk in old terms, and I find myself sometimes having to teach Westerners about what the market really means.
Vaclav Klaus
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You cannot have democratic accountability in anything bigger than a nation state.
Vaclav Klaus
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The attempts to command the climate and decide about the temperature on our planet are wrong and arrogant. I wrote a book about it which was published in English under the title “Blue Planet in Green Shackles.”
Vaclav Klaus
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I never intended to be a politician or office-seeker.
Vaclav Klaus
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Nevertheless, there is another threat on the horizon. I see this threat in environmentalism which is becoming a new dominant ideology, if not a religion. Its main weapon is raising the alarm and predicting the human life endangering climate change based on man-made global warming.
Vaclav Klaus
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What is concisely referred to as global warming, is a fatal mistake of the present time.
Vaclav Klaus
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Common foreign policy is completely unnecessary. The various European countries have widely differing priorities, goals and prejudices. It would be wrong to force them all to follow the same course.
Vaclav Klaus
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I also helped write the five-page statement of principles that Civic Forum issued in late November. That was the first public expression of what the new government wanted to do.
Vaclav Klaus
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Other top-level politicians do not express their global warming doubts because a whip of political correctness strangles their voice.
Vaclav Klaus
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My main concern is the political dimension of European integration. This is one of the most important issues of all, as far as I'm concerned. It has to do with our past, with our sensitivity, perhaps even our hypersensitivity in this regard.
Vaclav Klaus
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The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity, is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.
Vaclav Klaus
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I was paid to read Western economic texts. In a way, the regime paid for their own undermining.
Vaclav Klaus
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EU expansion is, unfortunately, continuing without a constitution, as a gradual process of standardization - and that's far more dangerous. It is very difficult to slow down this process, which is being pushed forward without significant public participation.
Vaclav Klaus
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EU didn't advance our [Eastern Europe] democracy by a single millimeter.
Vaclav Klaus
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Communism was replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism.
Vaclav Klaus
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I don't think there is any global warming. I don't see the statistical data for that.
Vaclav Klaus
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Then in 1969, I spent the spring term at Cornell University in New York. The invasion of August 1968 had already happened, but the hardline regime took several months to crack down on dissidents.
Vaclav Klaus
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The climate change debate is basically not about science it is about ideology. It is not about global temperature it is about the concept of human society. It is not about nature or scientific ecology it is about environmentalism, about one - recently born - dirigistic and collectivistic ideology, which goes against freedom and free markets.
Vaclav Klaus
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By the time I returned to Czechoslovakia, I had an understanding of the principles of the market.
Vaclav Klaus
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People like me who were engaging in brinkmanship with the party economic bosses and the open dissidents who were being arrested were pursuing a common goal in different ways.
Vaclav Klaus