Quotes by Václav Havel

Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning.

This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique...something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

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.

For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.

The point I am trying to make is that words are a mysterious, ambiguous, ambivalent, and perfidious phenomenon. They can be rays of light in a realm of darkness. . . . They can equally be lethal arrows. Worst of all, at times they can be one or the other. They can even be both at once!

The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We feel morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension.

You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances….It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.

True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?

“This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique...something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.”