“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.”

New Year's Address to the Nation (1991)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It has become clear that the legacy of the past decades we have to cope with is even worse than we anticipated or could…" by Václav Havel?

Václav Havel126

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

Related quotes

“Thus it is clear that the human race has at best a very limited capacity for solving even relatively straightforward social problems. How then is it going to solve the far more difficult and subtle problem of reconciling freedom with technology?”

Theodore Kaczynski book Industrial Society and Its Future

"Simpler Social Problems Have Proved Intractable", paragraph 138
Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)

“Hippocrates… is said to have proved the theorem that circles are to one another as the squares on their diameters, and it is difficult to see how he could have done this except by some form, or anticipation, of the method”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

of exhaustion
Achimedes (1920)

“We need to anticipate the character of the times, discern embryonic forms emergent or renewed, and clear the path for circumstantial change.”

David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) Israeli politician, Zionist leader, prime minister of Israel

Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (1954), p. 419; a portion of this paragraph has sometimes been misquoted as: "To maintain the status quo will not do. We have to set up a dynamic state bent upon expansion."
Context: Our code must be framed to speed the absorption of immigrants into our economy, culture and society; to fuse the returning tribes into a homogeneous national and cultural unit; to forward our physical and moral healing and the cleansing of our lives from the trivia and dross which gathered upon us in dependence and exile. To maintain the status quo will not do. We have set up a dynamic State, bent upon creation and reform, building and expansion. Laws which lag behind development, merely a digest of experience and the lessons of the past, are useless to us. We need to anticipate the character of the times, discern embryonic forms emergent or renewed, and clear the path for circumstantial change.

“How far can we anticipate the habitations and ways, the usages and adventures, the mighty employments, the ever increasing knowledge and power of the days to come? No more than a child with its scribbling paper and its box of bricks can picture or model the undertakings of its adult years.”

H. G. Wells book The Open Conspiracy

The Open Conspiracy (1933)
Context: How far can we anticipate the habitations and ways, the usages and adventures, the mighty employments, the ever increasing knowledge and power of the days to come? No more than a child with its scribbling paper and its box of bricks can picture or model the undertakings of its adult years. Our battle is with cruelties and frustrations, stupid, heavy and hateful things from which we shall escape at last, less like victors conquering a world than like sleepers awaking from a nightmare in the dawn.... A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously,"Was there ever such a world?"

“We must remain focused on the job of building our party. Jack showed us how we can do politics differently, how we can listen and respect other opinions and at the end of the day, remain united. And that's what we need to do today. We'll take difficult decisions but at the end of the day, we need to walk out of here and be united.”

Nycole Turmel (1942) Canadian politician

NDP will choose new leader in March http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2011/09/09/pol-ndp-federal-council-rules.html, September 9, 2011.

“Listen, it is absolutely clear the economy is not doing fine. That's the reason I had a press conference. That's why I spent yesterday, the day before yesterday, this past week, this past month, and this past year talking about how we can make the economy stronger. The economy is not doing fine.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

press conference http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/06/08/remarks-president-obama-and-president-aquino-philippines-after-bilateral welcoming President Aquino of the Philippines, , quoted in [2012-06-10, Obama's private sector remarks critiqued, defended on Sunday shows, Morgan, Little, Los Angeles Times, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/10/news/la-pn-obamas-private-sector-remarks-critiqued-defended-on-sunday-shows-20120610, 2012-06-29] posed question: "Mr. President, Mitt Romney says you're out of touch for saying the private sector is doing fine. What's your response?" 2012

“After 25 years of buying and supervising a great variety of businesses, Charlie and I have not learned how to solve difficult business problems. What we have learned is to avoid them.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

1989 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1989.html Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012) Context: After 25 years of buying and supervising a great variety of businesses, Charlie and I have not learned how to solve difficult business problems. What we have learned is to avoid them. To the extent we have been successful, it is because we concentrated on identifying one-foot hurdles that we could step over because we acquired any ability to clear seven-footers.

“In our relationships, how much can we allow them to become new, and how much do we cling to what they used to be yesterday?”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

“This is no day for the rabble-rouser, whether he be Negro or white.We must realize that we are grappling with the most weighty social problem of this nation, and in grappling with such a complex problem there is no place for misguided emotionalism. We must work passionately and unrelentingly for the goal of freedom, but we must be sure that our hands are clean in the struggle. We must never struggle with falsehood, hate, or malice. We must never become bitter. I know how we feel sometime. There is the danger that those of us who have been forced so long to stand amid the tragic midnight of oppression — those of us who have been trampled over, those of us who have been kicked about — there is the danger that we will become bitter. But if we will become bitter and indulge in hate campaigns, the new order which is emerging will be nothing but a duplication of the old order.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1950s, Give Us the Ballot (1957)

“Our memories are thronged with the past; our anticipations range over the future; and it is in the past and the future that we really live. It is so even with the higher animals: they too order their lives by memory and anticipation.”

Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) British physicist

Raymond, p. 312 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t80k3mq4s;view=1up;seq=354 Raymond, or Life and Death (1916)

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Václav Havel126

Related quotes

Related topics