“The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.”

— Václav Havel

New Year's Address to the Nation (1990)
Context: The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships.

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Václav Havel126

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

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“The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.”

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Václav Havel126

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