216 Quotes by Vaclav Havel

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

I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.

You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near it.

In my opinion, theater shouldn't give advice to citizens.

There is only one Art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth.

It lies in human nature that where you experience your first laughs, you also remember the age kindly.

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.

When the internal crisis of the totalitarian system grows so deep that it becomes clear to everyone, and when more and more people learn to speak their own language and reject the hollow, mendacious language of the powers that be, it means that freedom is remarkably close, if not directly within reach,

Every consession 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.