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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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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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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 was paid to read Western economic texts. In a way, the regime paid for their own undermining.
Vaclav Klaus
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Environmentalism is a dangerous ideology endangering human freedom.
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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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 am afraid there are people who want to stop the economic growth, the rise in the standard of living (though not their own) and the ability of man to use the expanding wealth, science and technology for solving the actual pressing problems of mankind, especially of the developing countries.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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
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Czech Republic is an important part of central Europe. It's clear that we must participate in European integration. I am convinced that the Czech Republic - or, in the past, Czechoslovakia - would have been one of the founding members of the EU if it hadn't been for the communist takeover in 1948.
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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What is concisely referred to as global warming, is a fatal mistake of the present time.
Vaclav Klaus
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It is what makes the reform process an art, not just a science. You have to develop a strategy that tells you what reform measures you should follow and in what sequence.
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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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