“The only lost cause is one we give up on before we enter the struggle.”

— Václav Havel

Quoted in Amnesty International's essay "From Prisoner to President – A Tribute" http://www.artforamnesty.org/aoc/biog_havel.html

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Václav Havel126

playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of … 1936–2011

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“We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent.”

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“How can we expect a righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone who will give himself up undividedly to a righteous cause?”

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Context: Just because so many things are in conflict does not mean that we ourselves should be divided. Yet time and time again one hears it said that since we have been put into a conflicting world, we have to adapt to it. Oddly, this completely unchristian idea is most often espoused by so-called Christians, of all people. How can we expect a righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone who will give himself up undividedly to a righteous cause?

“The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just; it shall not deter me.”

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“Every era has its defining struggle and the fate of Africa is one of ours. It's not the only one, but in the history books it's easily going to make the top five, what we did or what we did not do.”

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Context: Every era has its defining struggle and the fate of Africa is one of ours. It's not the only one, but in the history books it's easily going to make the top five, what we did or what we did not do. It's a proving ground, as I said earlier, for the idea of equality. But whether it's this or something else, I hope you'll pick a fight and get in it. Get your boots dirty, get rough, steel your courage with a final drink there at Smoky Joe's, one last primal scream and go.

“The only lost cause is one we give up on before we enter the struggle.”

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