91 quotes
There used to be a time when this country's president could have delivered the same New Year's Address he had given a year before, and nobody would have noticed.
Fortunately, that time has passed.
New Year's Address to the Nation (1991)
Consciousness precedes being, and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim. For this reason 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.
None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.
New Year's Address to the Nation (1990)
The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.
New Year's Address to the Nation (1990)
Let us teach ourselves and others that politics should be an expression of a desire to contribute to the happiness of the community rather than of a need to cheat or rape the community.
New Year's Address to the Nation (1990)
Without the constantly living and articulated experience of absurdity, there would be no reason to attempt to do something meaningful. And on the contrary, how can one experience one's own absurdity if one is not constantly seeking meaning?
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
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?
The recent period — and in particular the last six weeks of our peaceful revolution — has shown the enormous human, moral and spiritual potential, and the civic culture that slumbered in our society under the enforced mask of apathy.
New Year's Address to the Nation (1990)
My dear friends, I bid you farewell as your President. I remain with you as your fellow citizen!
Farewell Address (2003)
It also happens, rather often, that politicians do not actually talk to each other but only to one another's shadows as they appear in the media.
The Onassis Prize For Man and Mankind (1993)
Our country, if that is what we want, can now permanently radiate love, understanding, the power of the spirit and of ideas. It is precisely this glow that we can offer as our specific contribution to international politics.
New Year's Address to the Nation (1990)
What I am about to say may sound provocative, but I feel more and more strongly that even these ideas are not enough, that we must go farther and deeper.
The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World (1994)
People have passed through a very dark tunnel at the end of which there was a light of freedom. Unexpectedly they passed through the prison gates and found themselves in a square. They are now free and they don't know where to go.
There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.
Living in Truth (1986)
An ordinary human being, with a personal conscience, personally answering for something to somebody and personally and directly taking responsibility, seems to be receding farther and farther from the realm of politics.
The Onassis Prize For Man and Mankind (1993)
This forgotten awareness is encoded in all religions. All cultures anticipate it in various forms. It is one of the things that form the basis of man's understanding of himself, of his place in the world, and ultimately of the world as such.
The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World (1994)
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."
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
We introduced a new model of behavior: don't get involved in diffuse general ideological polemics with the center, to whom numerous concrete causes are always being sacrificed; fight "only" for those concrete causes, and be prepared to fight for them unswervingly, to the end. In other words, don't get mixed up in backroom wheeling and dealing, but play an open game.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
It logically follows that, in today's multicultural world, the truly reliable path to coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation, must start from what is at the root of all cultures and what lies infinitely deeper in human hearts and minds than political opinion, convictions, antipathies, or sympathies — it must be rooted in self-transcendence
The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World (1994)
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.
Living in Truth (1986)