91 quotes
Seemingly endless negotiations finally led to the division of Czechoslovakia. It had one great advantage: it proceeded calmly, without violence, major conflicts, or significant unsolved issues.
Those that say that individuals are not capable of changing anything are only looking for excuses.
We are finding out that what looked like a neglected house a year ago is in fact a ruin.
A genuinely fundamental and hopeful improvement in "systems" cannot happen without a significant shift in human consciousness.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
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.
Living in Truth (1986)
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.
The most important thing is that man should be the measure of all structures, including economic structures, and not that man be made to measure for those structures.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
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.
Sober perseverance is more effective than enthusiastic emotions, which are all too capable of being transferred, with little difficulty, to something different each day.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
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.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have — by disrupting that order — a way of surprising.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.
A year ago, we all were united in the joy over having broken free of totalitarianism. Today we all are made somewhat nervous by the burden of freedom.
New Year's Address to the Nation (1991)
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and … often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
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.
Living in Truth (1986)
The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power.
Living in Truth (1986)
The reason for the air attacks, the bombs is not a material interest. The reason is purely humanitarian.
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.
Life cannot be destroyed for good, neither … can history be brought entirely to a halt.
I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended.
The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World (1994)