Qoutes of Vaclav Havel, the champion of democracy in Eastern Europe

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.

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.

Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.

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.

New Year's Address to the Nation (1990)

• My dear fellow citizens,
  For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us.
  I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.

• Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nations is not being used sensibly. Entire branches of industry are producing goods that are of no interest to anyone, while we are lacking the things we need. A state which calls itself a workers' state humiliates and exploits workers. Our obsolete economy is wasting the little energy we have available.

• 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.  We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships.

И на чешки за да биде верен мојот омилен дел од овој говор:

Ale to všechno není stále ještě to hlavní. Nejhorší je, že žijeme ve zkaženém mravním prostředí. Morálně jsme onemocněli, protože jsme si zvykli něco jiného říkat a něco jiného si myslet. Naučili jsme se v nic nevěřit, nevšímat si jeden druhého, starat se jen o sebe. Pojmy jako láska, přátelství, soucit, pokora či odpuštění ztratily svou hloubku a rozměr a pro mnohé z nás znamenají jen jakési psychologické zvláštnosti, anebo se jeví jako zatoulané pozdravy z dávných časů, poněkud směšné v éře počítačů a kosmických raket.