Václav Havel quotes

Václav Havel was a Czech playwright, essayist, and political leader who became the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic. A prominent dissident, he was instrumental in the peaceful Velvet Revolution that ended communist rule in his country. He is remembered as a champion of human rights, democracy, and freedom. Here are 164 of his quotes:

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. (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. View quote
Václav Havel
Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace. View quote
Václav Havel
Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy. View quote
Václav Havel
Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not. View quote
Václav Havel
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. View quote
Václav Havel
Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have - by disrupting that order - a way of surprising. View quote
Václav Havel
There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side. View quote
Václav Havel
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. View quote
Václav Havel
Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it. View quote
Václav Havel
I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect. (Václav Havel)
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. View quote
Václav Havel
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. View quote
Václav Havel
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. View quote
Václav Havel
The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both. View quote
Václav Havel
Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life. View quote
Václav Havel
Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity. View quote
Václav Havel
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it. View quote
Václav Havel
The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought. View quote
Václav Havel
The truth is not simply what you think it is it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why, and how it is said. View quote
Václav Havel
People who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being. (Václav Havel)
Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us. View quote
Václav Havel
If every day a man takes orders in silence from an incompetent superior, if every day he solemnly performs ritual acts which he privately finds ridiculous, if he unhesitatingly gives answers to questionnaires which are contrary to his real opinions and is prepared to deny his own self in public, if he sees no difficulty in feigning sympathy or even affection where, in fact, he feels only indifference or aversion, it still does not mean that he has entirely lost the use of one of the basic human senses, namely, the sense of humiliation. View quote
Václav Havel
If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President. View quote
Václav Havel
A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear-sighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action. View quote
Václav Havel