Quotes from Vaclav Havel

To serve grand ideas with a major work is not bad, nor is it all there's to art.

Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around, as Marxists claim. For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better.

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

There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.

Lying can never save us from another lie.

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

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!

If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth. This is why it must be suppressed more severely than anything else.

As the interpretation of reality by the power structure, ideology is always subordinated ultimately to the interests of the structure. Therefore, it has a natural tendency to disengage itself from reality, to create a world of appearances, to become ritual... Increasingly, the virtuosity of the ritual becomes more important than the reality hidden behind it.

no one ever develops and achieves self-awareness in a vacuum, beyond all ears and systems. The period you grow up in and mature in always influences your thinking. This in itself requires no self-criticism. What is more important is how you have allowed yourself to be influenced, whether by good or by evil.

This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique...something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.

We still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics, science, and economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of our actions-if they are to be moral-is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success.

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!

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

What else but a profound feeling of being excluded can enable a person better to see the absurdity of the world and his own existence, or, to put it more soberly, the absurd dimensions of the world and his own existence?

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

For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.

Hope does not consist of expecting things to turn out well, it consists of hoping that it will make sense

None of us knows 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.

We know from a number of harsh experiences that neíther reform nor change is in itself a guarantee of anything. We know that ultimately it is all the same to us whether or not the system in which we live, in the light of a particular doctrine, appears changed or reformed. Our concern is whether we can live with dignity in such a system, whether it serves people rather than people serving it.

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. They want to be told this publicly. They want to know that those 'at the top' are on their side. They feel recognized and cultivated. For it to develop and have an impact it must hear that the world does not ridicule it.

So-obviously-I am not against political parties; if I were, I would be against democracy itself. I am simply against the dictatorship of partisanship. To be more precise, I am against the excessive influence of parties in the system of political power. Where the political system-and thus the state itself-is too dominated by parties, or too dependent on them, the consequences are unfortunate.

Think of this: Hundreds of people today are doing things that not a single one of the them would have dared to do at the beginning of the Seventies. We are now living in a truly new and different situation. This is not because the government has become more tolerant; it simply had to get used to the new situation. It has had to yield to continuing pressure from below, which means pressure from all those apparently suicidal or exhibitionistic civic acts.

And anyway, no one ever develops and achieves self-awareness in a vacuum, beyond all eras and systems. The period you grow up in and mature in always influence your thinking. This in itself requires no self-criticism. What is more important is how you have allowed yourself to be influenced, whether by good or evil.