Quotes from Vaclav Havel

The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.

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

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.

Education is the ability to perceive the hidden connections between phenomena.

People thought they could explain and conquer nature-yet the outcome is that they destroyed it and disinherited themselves from it.

It lies in human nature that where you experience your first laughs, you also remember the age kindly.

President Murabak has been a U.S. ally for decades. He was a guarantor of some degree of peace in the Middle East and has kept a good relationship with the Western world.

Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.

Human rights, human freedoms... and human dignity have their deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world... while the state is a human creation, human beings are the creation of God.

Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

Without commonly shared and widely entrenched moral values and obligations, neither the law, nor democratic government, nor even the market economy will function properly.

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.

People, your Government has returned to you!

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hope is the deep orientation of the human soul that can be held at the darkest times.

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.

The hope of the world lies in the rehabilitation of the living human being, not just the body but also the soul.

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.

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

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.

Nothing is more powerful than individuals acting out of their own conscience.

Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.

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.

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.