My dear fellow citizens, For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flour… - Václav Havel

Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.

Sono convinto che il modo migliore di affrontarli (ai regimi totalitari) sia quello di studiarli senza pregiudizio, imparare da essi e resistergli, comportandosi in modo radicalmente differente; laddove tale differenza nasce da una continua lotta contro il male che essi incarnano con tanta chiarezza, e che, tuttavia, dimora ovunque e quindi anche in ognuno di noi.

Until recently, it might have seemed that we were an unhappy bit of mildew on a heavenly body whirling in space among many that have no mildew on them at all. this was something that classical science could explain. Yet, the moment it begins to appear that we are deeply connected to the entire universe, science reaches the outer limits of its powers. Because it is founded on the search for universal laws, it cannot deal with singularity, that is, with uniqueness. The universe is a unique event and a unique story, and so far we are the unique point of that story. But unique events and stories are the domain of poetry, not science. With the formulation of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, science has found itself on the border between formula and story, between science and myth. In that, however, science has paradoxically returned, in a roundabout way, to man, and offers him — in new clothing — his lost integrity. It does so by anchoring him once more in the cosmos.