Václav Havel Quotes

The tragic element in modern man, not ignore the meaning of his life, but it bothers him less and less.

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.

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

Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nations is not being used sensibly. Entire branches of industry are producing goods that are of no interest to anyone, while we are lacking the things we need. A state which calls itself a workers' state humiliates and exploits workers. Our obsolete economy is wasting the little energy we have available.

In late 1989, the profound transformation that took place in this country brought me here to Prague Castle. It all happened so suddenly that I did not even have time to properly consider whether or not I was up to the task, and I was sincerely of the opinion that I would just take it on for a few months until the first free elections. Clearly, things turned out quite differently: I have now been here for more than thirteen years, if we discount the short break in the latter half of 1992.

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

... 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.

(Il potere totalitario) È la legge totalizzante di un potere borioso, anonimamente burocratico, non ancora irresponsabile ma già operante al di fuori della coscienza, un potere radicato in una finzione ideologica onnipresente, che può razionalizzare qualsiasi cosa, senza neppure dover entrare in contatto con la verità. Il potere come l’onnipresente monopolio del controllo, della repressione e della paura. Il potere che fa del pensiero, della moralità e della dimensione privata un monopolio di Stato e, in tal modo, li disumanizza. Il potere che da tempo non è più il problema di un gruppo di governanti arbitrari, ma che, piuttosto, invade e fagocita tutti, se non altro attraverso il loro silenzio, in modo che qualsiasi cosa diventi tutt’uno con esso. In realtà, nessuno possiede un tale potere, dal momento che è il potere stesso a possedere tutti; è una mostruosità che non è guidata dagli uomini, ma che, al contrario, li trascina tutti, con il suo «oggettivo» impeto di sé – oggettivo nel senso di essere estraneo a tutti i princìpi umani, inclusa la ragione umana e perciò interamente irrazionale – verso un futuro terrificante e sconosciuto.

siamo di fronte a un compito fondamentale da cui tutto il resto dovrebbe discendere. Tale compito è quello di resistere in modo vigile e attento, ma allo stesso tempo con totale dedizione, sempre e ovunque, all’impeto irrazionale del potere anonimo, impersonale e inumano, il potere delle ideologie, dei sistemi, degli apparati, della burocrazia, dei linguaggi artificiali e degli slogan politici. Dobbiamo resistere alla sua complessa e totalmente alienante pressione, sia che assuma la forma di consumo, pubblicità, repressione, tecnologia o cliché, che sono tutti consanguinei del fanatismo e fonte del pensiero totalitario.

"Why was Solzhenitsyn driven out of his own country? Certainly not because he represented a unit of real power, that is, not because any of the regime's representatives felt he might unseat them and take their place in government. Solzhenitsyn's expulsion was something else: a desperate attempt to plug up the dreadful wellspring of truth, a truth which might cause incalculable transformations in social consciousness, which in turn might one day produce political debacles unpredictable in their consequences. And so the post-totalitarian system behaved in a characteristic way: it defended the integrity of the world of appearances in order to defend itself. For the crust presented by the life of lies is made of strange stuff. As long as it seals off hermetically the entire society, it appears to be made of stone. But the moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, "The emperor is naked!" — when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game — everything suddenly appears in another light and the whole crust seems then to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably."

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.

Every meaningful cultural act — wherever it takes place — is unquestionably good in and of itself, simply because it exists and because it offers something to someone. Yet can this value 'in itself' really be separated from 'the common good'? Is not one an integral part of the other from the start? Does not the bare fact that a work of art has meant something to someone — even if only for a moment, perhaps to a single person — already somehow change, however minutely, the overall condition for the better? ... Can we separate the awakening human soul from what it always, already is — an awakening human community?

(By the way, the representatives of power invariably come to terms with those who live within the truth by persistently ascribing utilitarian motivations to them – a lust for power or fame or wealth – and thus they try, at least, to implicate them in their own world, the world of general demoralization.)

Patočka used to say that the most interesting thing about responsibility is that we carry it with us everywhere. That means that responsibility is ours, that we must accept it and grasp it here, now, in this place in time and space where the Lord has set us down, and that we cannot lie our way out of it by moving somewhere else, whether it be to an Indian ashram or to a parallel polis. If Western young people so often discover that retreat to an Indian monastery fails them as an individual or group solution, then this is obviously because, and only because, it lacks that element of universality, since not everyone can retire to an ashram. Christianity is an example of an opposite way out: it is a point of departure for me here and now-but only because anyone, anywhere, at any time, may avail themselves of it.

In other words, the parallel polis points beyond itself and makes sense only as an act of deepening one's responsibility to and for the whole, as a way of discovering the most appropriate locus for this responsibility, not as an escape from it.

It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial consumer society, for they, too, are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies.