Václav Havel

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.

International Herald Tribune (21 February 1990), 1990

Let us teach ourselves and others that politics should be an expression of a desire to contribute to the happiness of the community rather than of a need to cheat or rape the community.

1990

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.

1990

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.

1990

Those who rebelled against totalitarian rule and those who simply managed to remain themselves and think freely, were all persecuted. We should not forget any of those who paid for our present freedom in one way or another.

1990

I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.

Speech of October 1989, accepting a peace prize, 1989

There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them. Besides, to distrust words, and indict them for the horrors that might slumber unobtrusively within them — isn't this, after all, the true vocation of the intellectual?

Speech of October 1989, accepting a peace prize; quoted in The Independent, London (9 December 1989), 1989

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.

Letters to Olga (1988), p. 237, 1988

If the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man.

Ch. 1 : Growing Up "Outside", p. 11, 1986

Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.

Ch. 2 : Writing for the Stage, 1986

A genuinely fundamental and hopeful improvement in "systems" cannot happen without a significant shift in human consciousness.

Ch. 1 : Growing Up "Outside", p. 17, 1986

I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.

Ch. 2 : Writing for the Stage, 1986

As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.

Ch. 1 : Growing Up "Outside", p. 11, 1986

There is only one Art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. … Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

"Six Asides About Culture", 1986

Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.

Letter to the downthrown Czechoslovak Communist Party chairman Alexander Dubček (August 1969), as translated in Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 5 : The Politics of Hope, p. 115, 1986