Václav Havel citáty

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„Pracujte na niečom preto, že je to dobré, nielen preto, že to má šancu na úspech.“

„Nádej je stav ducha, ktorý dáva zmysel nášmu životu.“

„Ľudská pomoc v núdzi neobohacuje len toho, kto ju dostáva, ale aj toho, kto ju poskytuje.“

„Pravda a láska musia zvíťaziť nad lžou a nenávisťou.“

„Nenávisť kalí zrak, a tým znemožňuje hľadať pravdu.“

„Hovoriť pravdu má zmysel vždy, za každých okolností.“

„Pravda celá a úplná patria, ako je známe, do ríše nedosiahnuteľného.“

„Najlepšou cestou k vlastnému nešťastiu je zakrývať si oči pred nešťastím iných.“

„Ľahostajnosť k druhým a ľahostajnosť k osudu je presne tým, čo otvára dvere zlu.“

„Človek by sa mal správať tak, ako si mysli, že by sa mali správať všetci.“

„V politike nerozhodujú úmysly, ale výsledky.“

„Ženy majú v sebe niečo, čo by sa malo objaviť v politike. Citlivosť ku konkrétnej situácii, ku konkrétnemu človeku.“

„Život je radostná spoluúčasť na zázraku bytia.“

„Necítim žiadne sentimentálne väzby na československý štát. Nekladiem vyššiu hodnotu štátu, ale skôr človeku a humanizmu.
O rozdelení Česko-slovenska.“

„Človek nie je iba hračkou okolností, ale vždy aj ich tvorcom.“

„Dobrá práca je kritikou zlej politiky.“

„Ľudia celkom radi prijímajú dary slobody, ale neradi nesú jej nevýhody.“

„Nič ľudského mi nie je cudzie.“

„Svet je stratený len do tej miery, do akej je sám stratený.“

„Tajomstvo budúcnosti kultúry je obrazom samej záhady ľudského ducha.“

“My dear fellow citizens,
For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us.
I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.”

“I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.”

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

“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.”

“You may ask what kind of republic I dream of. Let me reply: I dream of a republic independent, free, and democratic, of a republic economically prosperous and yet socially just; in short, of a humane republic that serves the individual and that therefore holds the hope that the individual will serve it in turn. Of a republic of well-rounded people, because without such people it is impossible to solve any of our problems — human, economic, ecological, social, or political.”

“If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.”

“One has to greatly admire the patience with which our society has come to terms with all the challenges of these dramatic times, the extent of which few of us could have anticipated in those heady, revolutionary days.”

“I know we have still done very little, and that the main tasks still lie ahead of us. I would say that we have just completed a year of preparation in which the conditions for a new environment have been created.”

“We are finding out that what looked like a neglected house a year ago is in fact a ruin.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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."”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”