Václav Havel Quotes

Without the constantly living and articulated experience of absurdity, there would be no reason to attempt to do something meaningful. And on the contrary, how can one experience one's own absurdity if one is not constantly seeking meaning?

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

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.

Excessive emphasis on political parties can have many unfortunate consequences….Power-hungry people, under certain circumstances, can use their party membership, their servility to party leaders, their clever concealment behind the party flag, to gain a position and influence that is out of all proportion to their qualities….Politicians seem to be devoting more time to party politics than to their jobs. Not a single law is passed without a debate about how a particular stand might serve a party’s popularity. Ideas, no matter how absurd, are touted purely to gain favour with the electorate.

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

All my adult life, I was branded by officials as ‘an exponent of the right’ who wanted to bring capitalism back to our country. Today-at a ripe old age-I am suspected by some of being left-wing, if not harbouring out-and-out socialist tendencies. What, then is my real position? …I refuse to classify myself as left or right. I stand between these two political and ideological front-lines, independent of them. Some of my opinions may seem left-wing, no doubt, and some right-wing, and I can even imagine that a single opinion may seem left-wing to some and right-wing to others-and to tell you the truth, I couldn’t care less. But most of all I am loath to describe myself as a man of the centre. It seems absurd to define oneself in topographical terms, the more so because the position of the imaginary centre is entirely dependent on the angle from which it is viewed.

I do not see, however, why a democratic state, armed with a legislature and the power to draw up a budget, cannot strive for a certain fairness in, for example, pension policies or tax policies, or support to the unemployed, or salaries to public employees, or assistance to the elderly living alone, people who have health problems, or those who, for various reasons, find themselves at the bottom of society. Every civilized state attempts, in different ways and with different degrees of success, to come up with reasonable policies in these areas, and not even the most ardent supporters of the market economy have anything against it in principle. In the end, then, it is a conflict not of beliefs, but rather of terminology.

Periods of history when values undergo a fundamental shift are certainly not unprecedented. This happened in the Hellenistic period, when from the ruins of the classical world the Middle Ages were gradually born. It happened during the Renaissance, which opened the way to the modern era. The distinguishing features of such transitional periods are a mixing and blending of cultures and a plurality or parallelism of intellectual and spiritual worlds. These are periods when all consistent value systems collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are discovered or rediscovered. They are periods when there is a tendency to quote, to imitate, and to amplify, rather than to state with authority or integrate. New meaning is gradually born from the encounter, or the intersection, of many different elements.

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.

La miglior resistenza al totalitarismo è semplicemente quella di
allontanarlo dalle nostre anime, dalla nostra realtà, dalla nostra terra, di
scacciarlo dall’umanità contemporanea. Il migliore aiuto per chi soffre sotto i regimi totalitari è quello di affrontare il male che il sistema totalitario rappresenta, dal quale trae la sua forza e del quale la sua «avanguardia» si nutre. Se non esiste una tale avanguardia, un germoglio estremista da cui possa svilupparsi, il sistema non avrà niente su cui appoggiarsi. Una riaffermata responsabilità umana è la barriera più naturale contro tutta l’irresponsabilità.

Life cannot be destroyed for good, neither … can history be brought entirely to a halt. A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy lid of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undercutting it. It may be a long process, but one day it must happen: the lid will no longer hold and will start to crack. 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.

The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We feel morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension.

The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships.

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.

Our country, if that is what we want, can now permanently radiate love, understanding, the power of the spirit and of ideas. It is precisely this glow that we can offer as our specific contribution to international politics.