Quotes from Vaclav Havel

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

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.

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.

Keep the company of those who seek the truth- run from those who have found it

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

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

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.

You do not become a ''dissident'' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.

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

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.

As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.

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.

Truth and love will overcome lies and hatred.

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.

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

All human suffering concerns each human being

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

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

The kind of hope that I often think about…I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we don't. It is a dimension of the soul It's not essentially dependent upon some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

The Declaration of Independence states that 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.

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.

Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace.

Hope is a feeling that life and work have meaning. You either have it or you don't, regardless of the state of the world that surrounds you.

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