Václav Havel Quotes

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.

….what else are parallel structures than an area where a different life can be lived, a life that is in harmony with its own aims and which in turn structures itself in harmony with those aims? . . .What else are those initial attempts at social self-organization than the efforts of a certain part of society…to rid itself of the self-sustaining aspects of totalitarianism and, thus, to extricate itself radically from its involvement in the…totalitarian system?

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 yet it seems to me that the thought and activity of those friends who have never given up direct political work and who are always ready to assume direct political responsibility very often suffer from one chronic fault: an insufficient understanding of the historical uniqueness of the posttotalitarian system as a social and political reality. They have little understanding of the specific nature of power that is typical for this system and therefore they overestimate the importance of direct political work in the traditional sense. Moreover, they fail to appreciate the political significance of those "pre-political" events and processes that provide the living humus from which genuine political change usually springs. As political actors-or, rather, as people with political ambitions-they frequently try to pick up where natural political life left off. They maintain models of behavior that may have been appropriate in more normal political circumstances and thus, without really being aware of it, they bring an outmoded way of thinking, old habits, conceptions, categories, and notions to bear on circumstances that are quite new and radically different, without first giving adequate thought to the meaning and substance of such things in the new circumstances, to what politics as such means now, to what sort of thing can have political impact and potential, and in what way- Because such people have been excluded from the structures of power and are no longer able to influence those structures directly (and because they remain faithful to traditional notions of politics established in more or less democratic societies or in classical dictatorships) they frequently, in a sense, lose touch with reality. Why make compromises with reality, they say, when none of our proposals will ever be accepted anyway? Thus they find themselves in a world of genuinely utopian thinking."

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.

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.

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….It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.

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.

Again, I call to mind that distant moment in [the prison at] Hermanice when on a hot, cloudless summer day, I sat on a pile of rusty iron and gazed into the crown of an enormous tree that stretched, with dignified repose, up and over all the fences, wires, bars and watchtowers that separated me from it. As I watched the imperceptible trembling of its leaves against an endless sky, I was overcome by a sensation that is difficult to describe: all at once, I seemed to rise above all the coordinates of my momentary existence in the world into a kind of state outside time in which all the beautiful things I had ever seen and experienced existed in a total “co-present”; I felt a sense of reconciliation, indeed of an almost gentle consent to the inevitable course of things as revealed to me now, and this combined with a carefree determination to face what had to be faced. A profound amazement at the sovereignty of Being became a dizzying sensation of tumbling endlessly into the abyss of its mystery; an unbounded joy at being alive, at having been given the chance to live through all I have lived through, and at the fact that everything has a deep and obvious meaning — this joy formed a strange alliance in me with a vague horror at the inapprehensibility and unattainability of everything I was so close to in that moment, standing at the very “edge of the finite”; I was flooded with a sense of ultimate happiness and harmony with the world and with myself, with that moment, with all the moments I could call up, and with everything invisible that lies behind it and has meaning. I would even say that I was somehow “struck by love,” though I don’t know precisely for whom or what.

Political parties and tendencies always have differed, and always will differ, chiefly in the relative importance they give to economic and social phenomena, in how they approach them and how to explain them, and in their opinions on the best way to organize economic life. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But that is as far as it goes. Right-wing dogmatism, with its sour-faced intolerance and fanatical faith in general precepts, bothers me as much as left-wing prejudices, illusions, and utopias….By the way, it is a great mistake to think that the marketplace and morality are mutually exclusive. Precisely the opposite is true; the marketplace can work only if it has its own morality-a morality generally enshrined in laws, regulations, traditions, experiences, customs-in the rules of the game, to put it simply. No game can be played without rules. (It is no coincidence that many ancient religious books come with a moral codex and something like a set of regulations for commerce.)

True enough, order prevails.... What prevails is order without life.

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

It is largely up to the politicians which social forces they choose to liberate and which they choose to suppress, whether they rely on the good in each citizen or the bad. The former regime systematically mobilized the worst human qualities, like selfishness, envy, and hatred.

It seems the primary breeding group for what might, in the widest possible sense of the word, be understood as an opposition in the post-totalitarian system is living within the truth. The confrontation between these opposition forces and the powers that be, of course, will obviously take a form essentially different from that typical of an open society or a classical dictatorship. Initially, this confrontation does not take place on the level of real, institutionalized, quantifiable power which relies on the various instruments of power, but on a different level altogether: the level of human consciousness and conscience, the existential level. The effective range of this special power cannot be measured in terms of disciples, voters, or soldiers, because it lies spread out in the fifth column of social consciousness, in the hidden aims of life, in human beings' repressed longing for dignity and fundamental rights, for the realization of their real social and political interests. Its power, therefore does not reside in the strength of definable political or social groups, but chiefly in the strength of a potential, which is hidden throughout the whole of society, including the official power structures of that society. Therefore this power does not rely on soldiers of its own, but on the soldiers of the enemy as it were — that is to say, on everyone who is living within the lie and who may be struck at any moment (in theory, at least) by the force of truth (or who, out of an instinctive desire to protect their position, may at least adapt to that force). It is a bacteriological weapon, so to speak, utilized when conditions are ripe by a single civilian to disarm an entire division. This power does not participate in any direct struggle for power; rather, it makes its influence felt in the obscure arena of being itself. The hidden movements it gives rise to there, however, can issue forth (when, where, under what circumstances, and to what extent are difficult to pr

نظام پساتوتالیترهمیشه و در هر قدم مردم را لمس می‌کند، اما همیشه با دستانی پوشیده در دستکش‌های ایدئولژیک و برای همین بود که زندگی در این نظام چنین آکنده از دورویی و ریا و دورغ است؛ حکومت بروکراتیک، حکومت مردمی خوانده می‌شود؛ کاگران به نام طبقه کارگر، به بردگی کشیده می‌شوند؛ به خواری و خفت کشیدن افراد، با عنوان آزادی تمام عیار عرضه می‌شود؛ محروم کردن افراد از اطلاعات، اطلاع‌رسانی خوانده می‌شود؛ استفاده از قدرت برای ملعبه‌سازی، نظارت عمومی بر قدرت خوانده می‌شود؛‌ و سوء استفاده دلبخواهی از قدرت، رعایت قانون؛ سرکوب فرهنگ، رشد و توسعه فرهنگ خوانده می‌شود؛ توسعه نفوذ امپریالیسمی، به نام دفاع از ستم دیده شدگان عرضه می‌شود؛ فقدان آزادی بیان، در لباس عالی‌ترین شکل آزادی ارائه می‌شود؛ به انتخابات نمایشی مضحک، عالی‌ترین شکل دموکراسی اطلاق می‌شود؛ ممنوعیت تفکر مستقل، علمی‌ترین جهان‌بینی نام می‌گیرد؛ و اشغال نظامی هم، می‌شود کمک برادرانه. چون رژیم در بند دروغ‌های خودش است، باید همه‌چیز را جعل کند و وارونه جلوه دهد. باید گذشته را جعل کند، باید حال را جعل کند و باید آینده را هم جعل کند. باید آمارها را جعل کند. باید منکر این شود که یک دستگاه امنیتی فراگیر، غیرپاسخگو و خودسر دارد. باید وانمود کند به حقوق بشر احترام می‌گذارد و باید وانمود کند کسی را مورد پیگرد و آزار قرار نمی‌دهد. باید وانمود کند از هیچ‌جیز و هیچ‌کس نمی‌ترسد. باید وانمود کند در هیچ موردی وانمود نمی‌کند

The real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?