Václav Havel (1936–2011) was a Czech playwright, poet, human rights activist, and political dissident. After the fall of communism, he served as president of Czechoslovakia 1989–92 and of the Czech Republic 1993–2003.
Born in Prague, Havel came from a bourgeois family known for its antagonism to the reigning communists. After getting educated at the Academy of Dramatic Art, he began work as a stagehand at the Divadlo Na zábradlí (Theatre on the Balustrade,) becoming a resident writer there 1960–69.
Havel’s work includes Zahradní slavnost (1963; The Garden Party, 1969,) Vyrozumění (1967; The Memorandum,) Spiklenci (1970; The Conspirators,) and Audience (1976; Temptation, 1976.) The Garden Party and The Memorandum used absurdist techniques to analyze totalitarianism, in particular its corrupting effects on language and personal integrity. Following the Soviet-led crackdown of 1968—69, his work was forbidden from the stage for over twenty years.
Havel was one of the founders of Charter 77 in 1977. Deemed subversive, he was frequently arrested, and in 1979 was imprisoned for four and a half years. He was again imprisoned in February 1989, but was released three months later.
In December 1989, after the overthrow of the Czechoslovak Communist Party during the Velvet Revolution, Havel was elected president by direct popular ballot. He supervised the peaceful division of Czechoslovakia into discrete Czech and Slovak states in 1992, and was elected president of the Czech Republic in 1993. He was re-elected in 1998, and stepped down in 2003. He continued to write and speak on human rights and social issues.
Havel’s publications in English translation include The Power of the Powerless (1985,) Selected Plays (1991,) Towards a Civil Society (1994,) and Leaving (2008.)
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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. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.
—Vaclav Havel
The law is only one of several imperfect and more or less external ways of defending what is better in life against what is worse. By itself, the law can never create anything better. Establishing respect for the law does not automatically ensure a better life for that, after all, is a job for people and not for laws and institutions.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Lawyers
True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?
—Vaclav Havel
There’s always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Intelligence, Intellectuals
Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have — by disrupting that order — a way of surprising.
—Vaclav 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.
—Vaclav 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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Slavery
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…
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Hope
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Books, Literature
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.
—Vaclav Havel
There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them. Besides, to distrust words, and indict them for the horrors that might slumber unobtrusively within them –isn’t this, after all, the true vocation of the intellectual?
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Words
Without commonly shared and widely entrenched moral values and obligations, neither the law, nor democratic government, nor even the market economy will function properly.
—Vaclav 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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Protest
Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Hope
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.
—Vaclav Havel
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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Authors & Writing
Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Laughter
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.
—Vaclav Havel
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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Living
Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary master plan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people’s own failure as individuals.
—Vaclav Havel
This is a confusing and uncertain period, when a thousand wise words can go completely unnoticed, and one thoughtless word can provoke an utterly nonsensical furor.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Language
We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly impossible to become a reality.
—Vaclav Havel
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. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Art, Artists
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.
—Vaclav Havel
Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Work
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.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Books, Literature
Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Hope
Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to prosecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
—Vaclav Havel
I have preserved my identity, put its credibility to the test and defended my dignity. What good this will bring the world I don’t know. But for me it is good.
—Vaclav Havel
Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren’t in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Suicide
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.
—Vaclav 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.
—Vaclav Havel
A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear-sighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerally of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.
—Vaclav Havel
Topics: Action, Awareness
We must come to understand the deep mutual connection or kinship between the various forms of our spirituality. We must recollect our original spiritual and moral substance, which grew out of the same essential experience of humanity. I believe that this is the only way to achieve a genuine renewal of our sense of responsibility for ourselves and for the world. And at the same time, it is the only way to achieve a deeper understanding among cultures that will enable them to work together in a truly ecumenical way to create a new order for the world.
—Vaclav Havel