Vaclav Quotes

#1. . . . and Vaclav's special new shoes with the lights on the heels and the Velcro everywhere, because in America no one, not even small children, has time to tie his own shoes, and everything must have flashing lights.

Haley Tanner

#2. I would count myself as a friend of Vaclav Havel.

Tom Stoppard

#3. Years ago - I used to be an actor - I was in a production of Vaclav Havel's 'Temptation,' and when we started rehearsals, he was in prison. When we closed the show, he was running for president. And it felt incredibly timely and important and also this lucky thing.

Kelly Sue DeConnick

#4. The system was afraid of Vaclav Havel. And so they either harassed him for put him in jail.

Judy Woodruff

#5. Through the inspiration of Vaclav's words, the courage of his dissidence and the integrity of his leadership, Czechoslovakia successfully transitioned from an authoritarian state to a free democracy at the heart of Europe.

Michael D. Higgins

#6. It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs. - Vaclav Havel

J.J. McAvoy

#7. Our indifference towards others can after all result in only one thing: the indifference of others towards us.
Vaclav Havel, quoted in Havel: A Life

Michael Zantovsky

#8. I think that, from Vaclav Havel own experience, he knew if we all paid attention to what was going on, the chances were that even the most horrible dictators wouldn't execute people.

Judy Woodruff

#9. There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

Bill Gates

#10. Vaclav Havel didn't want to ride around in big black cars. And he had his own car with a little red heart on it. And he loved to go out and talk to the people.

Judy Woodruff

#11. I think he [Vaclav Havel] is one of the great figures of the 20th century. He is one of the people that was able to be a part of overthrowing a dictatorial system by talking to people and understanding what the elements of democracy really are and respect for each other and elevating.

Judy Woodruff

#12. I think he [Vaclav Havel] felt that he could speak more truth, in a way, through writing plays.

Judy Woodruff

#13. Vaclav Havel is the figure that represents the Velvet Revolution and the reunification of Europe. He will be sorely missed.

Jerzy Buzek

#14. Vaclav has said goodnight to Lena every night since the night she went away. Out loud. In a whisper. [...] He filled the words with all his love and care and worry for Lena and launched them out to her, and like homing pigeons, he trusted them to find her.

Haley Tanner

#15. He [Vaclav Havel] did love music. And so much about the Czech revolution was about music.

Judy Woodruff

#16. I think he [Vaclav Havel] probably would have liked to have written more plays. I think he missed being a playwright.I think he talked about wanting to write plays and keep appealing to people through that medium, rather than politics.

Judy Woodruff

#17. Vaclav Havel had this great sense of humor. And you kind of felt that he was making a little bit fun of everything at the same time.

Judy Woodruff

#18. Vaclav Havel had moral stature. The president in first Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic in many ways is a ceremonial role. And so, speaking out and having that strong moral fiber, people just knew that he told the truth to people who had only heard lies. And so I think his - that's his legacy.

Judy Woodruff

#19. I'd always admired the intellectuals who had made the transition into politics - Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic, Carlos Fuentes in Mexico - but I knew that many of them had failed, and in any event, I wasn't exactly in their league.

Michael Ignatieff

#20. 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

#21. The farther we go, the more the ultimate explanation recedes from us, and all we have left is faith.

Vaclav Hlavaty

#22. I cannot imagine that I could strive for something if I did not carry hope in me.

Vaclav Havel

#23. That means following a very restrictive fiscal and monetary policy which will squeeze the monopolies and cut their subsidies. On the micro level we will allow other economic agents, both domestic and foreign, to compete with them.

Vaclav Klaus

#24. I do not consider the Lisbon Treaty to be a good thing for Europe, for the freedom of Europe, or for the Czech Republic.

Vaclav Klaus

#25. 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

#26. True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?

Vaclav Havel

#27. It is not enough to invent new machines, new regulations, or new institutions. We must understand differently and more perfectly the true purpose of our existence on this earth.

Vaclav Havel

#28. If a single writer in a country is in chains, then there are some links of that chain that binds us all.

Vaclav Havel

#29. Responsibility is something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where, and only where, they will be properly judged.

Vaclav Havel

#30. 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.

Vaclav Havel

#31. I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence.

Vaclav Havel

#32. Theater is there to search for questions. It doesn't give you instructions.

Vaclav Havel

#33. The best environment for man is the environment of liberty

Vaclav Klaus

#34. Time and time again I have been persuaded that a huge potential of goodwill is slumbering within our society. It's just that it's incoherent, suppressed, confused, crippled and perplexed.

Vaclav Havel

#35. The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.

Vaclav Havel

#36. A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear-sighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerally of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.

Vaclav Havel

#37. We served on the editorial board of a literary monthly called Face in 1968 and 1969. He was a young writer, and I was also interested in broad cultural issues. We agreed on all major issues and became friends.

Vaclav Klaus

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

Vaclav Havel

#39. I have preserved my identity, put its credibility to the test and defended my dignity. What good this will bring the world I don't know. But for me it is good.

Vaclav Havel

#40. There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them.

Vaclav Havel

#41. When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.

Vaclav Havel

#42. 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.

Vaclav Havel

#43. I am in favor of [actions] that have authenticity, roots, originality, verve, balance, taste, communicativeness, challenge, relevance to their time-in short, things that make sense.

Vaclav Havel

#44. I never intended to be a politician or office-seeker.

Vaclav Klaus

#45. Everyone [in higher education] was what I call drillers of deeper wells. These academics sit at the bottom of a deep well and they look up and see a sliver of the sky. They know everything about that little sliver of sky and nothing else. I scan all my horizons.

Vaclav Smil

#46. I have said it so often: if the West does not stabilize the East, the East will destabilize the West.

Vaclav Havel

#47. There is only one Art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth.

Vaclav Havel

#48. If the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man.

Vaclav Havel

#49. As in everything else, I must start with myself. That is: in all circumstances try to be decent, just, tolerant, and understanding, and at the same time try to resist corruption and deception. In other words, I must do my utmost to act in harmony with my conscience and my better self.

Vaclav Havel

#50. Self-confidence is not pride. Just the contrary: only a person or a nation that is self-confident, in the best sense of the word, is capable of listening to others, accepting them as equals, forgiving its enemies and regretting its own guilt.

Vaclav Havel

#51. Vision is not enough, it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs.

Vaclav Havel

#52. 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.

Vaclav Havel

#53. 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.

Vaclav Havel

#54. Environmentalism is a dangerous ideology endangering human freedom.

Vaclav Klaus

#55. If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.

Vaclav Havel

#56. 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

#57. Truth must be integrated with love; morality is not whole without it. Love is the greatest strength of the powerless. Unity founded on love will never be coercion; power guided by love will never be violence. Love is all-powerful and will even overcome hatred. And only love can do this!

Vaclav Havel

#58. 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

#59. The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.

Vaclav Havel

#60. 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.

Vaclav Havel

#61. Man is not an omipotent master of the universe, allowed to do with impunity whatever he thinks, or whatever suits him at the moment. The world we live in is made of an immensely complex and mysterious tissue about which we know very little and which we must treat with utmost humility.

Vaclav Havel

#62. To talk about planning an economic system is to talk in old terms, and I find myself sometimes having to teach Westers about what the market really means.

Vaclav Klaus

#63. In any case, ideals are something we strive for; they are somewhere on the horizon of our efforts; they provide meaning and direction; they are not, however, static quotas that we either fulfill or do not.

Vaclav Havel

#64. There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.

Vaclav Havel

#65. Those of us who lived under communism for most of our lives were looking toward the Western world because of its values, emphasis on democracy, individual liberties and freedom, and economic prosperity.

Vaclav Klaus

#66. 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.

Vaclav Havel

#67. The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning.

Vaclav Havel

#68. I think it's important for one to take a certain distance from oneself.

Vaclav Havel

#69. 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

#70. To pursue a so-called Third Way is foolish. We had our experience with this in the 1960s when we looked for a socialism with a human face. It did not work, and we must be explicit that we are not aiming for a more efficient version of a system that has failed.

Vaclav Klaus

#71. 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.

Vaclav Havel

#72. The truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why, and how it is said.

Vaclav Havel

#73. In my opinion, theater shouldn't give advice to citizens.

Vaclav Havel

#74. Evil must be confronted in its womb and, if it can't be done otherwise, then it has to be dealt with by the use of force.

Vaclav Havel

#75. EU didn't advance our [Eastern Europe] democracy by a single millimeter.

Vaclav Klaus

#76. The Declaration of Independence states the 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.

Vaclav Havel

#77. The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.

Vaclav Havel

#78. The point I am trying to make is that words are a mysterious, ambiguous, ambivalent, and perfidious phenomenon. They can be rays of light in a realm of darkness ... They can equally be lethal arrows. Worst of all, at times they can be one or the other. They can even be both at once!

Vaclav Havel

#79. Though my heart may be left of centre, I have always known that the only economic system that works is a market economy ... This is the only natural economy, the only kind that makes sense, the only one that can lead to prosperity, because it is the only one that reflects the nature of life itself.

Vaclav Havel

#80. I'm absolutely convinced that the very small global warming we are experiencing is the result of natural causes. It's a cyclical phenomenon in the history of the Earth. The role of man is very small, almost negligible.

Vaclav Klaus

#81. Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.

Vaclav Havel

#82. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.

Vaclav Havel

#83. In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life. This is much more than a simple conflict between two identities. It is something far worse: it is a challenge to the very notion of identity itself.

Vaclav Havel

#84. We live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.

Vaclav Havel

#85. What's certain is that a totalitarian enclave like Cuba's can't continue to exist, so change will definitely come there, eventually.

Vaclav Havel

#86. 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

#87. Our concern is whether we can live with dignity in such a system, whether it serves people rather than people serving it.

Vaclav Havel

#88. If one were required to increase the dramatic seriousness of his face in relation to the seriousness of the problems he had to confront, he would quickly petrify and become his own statue.

Vaclav Havel

#89. Hope 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

#90. Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have - by disrupting that order - a way of surprising.

Vaclav Havel

#91. I was paid to read Western economic texts. In a way, the regime paid for their own undermining.

Vaclav Klaus

#92. 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

#93. You get up and, first thing in the morning, you do your 500 words. Do it every day and you've got a book in eight or nine months.

Vaclav Smil

#94. Those that say that individuals are not capable of changing anything are only looking for excuses.

Vaclav Havel

#95. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We feel 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.

Vaclav Havel

#96. 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

#97. 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.

Vaclav Havel

#98. 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.

Vaclav Havel

#99. Courage means going against majority opinion in the name of the truth.

Vaclav Havel

#100. People who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being.

Vaclav Havel