216 Quotes by Vaclav Havel

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Ideology offers human beings the illusion of dignity and morals while making it easier to part with them.

What else but a profound feeling of being excluded can enable a person better to see the absurdity of the world and his own existence, or, to put it more soberly, the absurd dimensions of the world and his own existence?

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

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.