Václav Havel: Trending quotes (page 6)

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Václav Havel: 252   quotes 10   likes

“Let us admit that most of us writers feel an essential aversion to politics. By taking such a position, however, we accept the perverted principle of specialization, according to which some are paid to write about the horrors of the world and human responsibility and others to deal with those horrors and bear the human responsibility for them.”

Václav Havel

Address to the Prague World Congress of International PEN Club (7 November 1994) http://www.englishpen.org/writersinprison/wipcnews/peninternationaldeeplysaddenedbydeathofvclavhavelaconstantchampionforfreedomofexpression/

World , Feeling

“Our civilization has essentially globalized only the surfaces of our lives. But our inner self continues to have a life of its own. And the fewer answers the era of rational knowledge provides to the basic questions of human Being, the more deeply it would seem that people, behind its back as it were, cling to the ancient certainties of their tribe. Because of this, individual cultures, increasingly lumped together by contemporary civilization, are realizing with new urgency their own inner autonomy and the inner differences of others.”

Václav Havel

The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World (1994)

Life , People , Question , Knowledge

“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.”

Václav Havel

Farewell Address (2003)

Time , Sincerity , Country

“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.”

Václav Havel

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

Hope , Time

“There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.”

Václav Havel book The Power of the Powerless

Source: Living in Truth (1986), The Power of the Powerless

Truth , Star , Understanding , Time

“I believe that during the intervention of NATO in Kosovo there is an element nobody can question: the air attacks, the bombs, are not caused by a material interest. Their character is exclusively humanitarian: What is at stake here are the principles, human rights which have priority above state sovereignty. This makes it legitimate to attack the Yugoslav Federation, although without the United Nations mandate.”

Václav Havel

Interview for the French newspaper Le Monde (29 April 1999); this statement is considered the source of the term w:Humanitarian bombing", frequently used about the Kosovo War.

Question

“The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and … often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.”

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Source: Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 3 : Facing the Establishment

Literature , Suffering

“It has become clear that the legacy of the past decades we have to cope with is even worse than we anticipated or could anticipate in the joyful atmosphere of those first weeks of freedom. New problems are emerging day by day, and we can see how interconnected they are, how long it takes to solve them, and how difficult it is to establish priorities.”

Václav Havel

New Year's Address to the Nation (1991)

Problem , Freedom , Past

“We introduced a new model of behavior: don't get involved in diffuse general ideological polemics with the center, to whom numerous concrete causes are always being sacrificed; fight "only" for those concrete causes, and be prepared to fight for them unswervingly, to the end. In other words, don't get mixed up in backroom wheeling and dealing, but play an open game.”

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Source: Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 3 : Facing the Establishment, p. 83

Behavior , Game , Fight

“The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.”

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Source: Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 2 : Writing for the Stage

Way , Light

“It's not true that you should first think up an idea for a better world and only then "put it into practice," but, rather, through the fact of your existence in the world, you create the idea or manifest it — create it, as it were, from the "material of the world," articulate it in the "language of the world."”

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Source: Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 1 : Growing Up "Outside", p. 12

World , Idea , Thinking

“It also happens, rather often, that politicians do not actually talk to each other but only to one another's shadows as they appear in the media.”

Václav Havel

The Onassis Prize For Man and Mankind (1993)

Appearance

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

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Source: Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 5

“None of us know 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.”

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Source: Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 3 : Facing the Establishment

Way

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

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Source: Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 5

Way

“The cliché organizes life; it expropriates people's identity; it becomes ruler, defense lawyer, judge, and the law.”

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Source: Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 5

Life , People , Law

“I have had direct experience of this myself. Often, what the press wrote, or did not write, about a remark I made somewhere proved to be of a far greater consequence than the remark itself. Democratic choice in such cases ceases to be a choice between alternatives people are familiar with, and have personally tried, and becomes a choice between alternatives offered by those who run the media.”

Václav Havel

The Onassis Prize For Man and Mankind (1993)

People , Personality

“My dear friends, I bid you farewell as your President. I remain with you as your fellow citizen!”

Václav Havel

Farewell Address (2003)

“A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clearsighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.”

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Source: Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 5 : The Politics of Hope, p. 113

Spring

“Every concession gives rise to further concessions, we cannot back down, because behind us there is only an abyss, we must keep our promises and demand that they be kept.”

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Source: Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 5 : The Politics of Hope, p. 110