Quotes from Vaclav Havel

Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations.

Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.

Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness a more humane society will not emerge.

The only salvation of the world today... is the rapid dissemination of the basic values of the West, that is, the ideas of democracy, human rights, the civil society, and the free market.

It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs.

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.

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.

Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning.

Communism was overthrown by life, by thought, by dignity.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.

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

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

I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.

The cliché organizes life; it expropriates people's identity; it becomes ruler, defense lawyer, judge, and the law.

I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.

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.

Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.

I personally think President [Hosni] Mubarak, who's done a lot for Egypt, should acknowledge that his time has come and step down right away.

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.

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.

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

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

Follow the man who seeks the truth; run from the man who has found it.