Vaclav Havel

Theater is there to search for questions. It doesn't give you instructions.

I think it's important for one to take a certain distance from oneself.

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.

I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.

What's certain is that a totalitarian enclave like Cuba's can't continue to exist, so change will definitely come there, eventually.

But if I were to say who influenced me most, then I'd say Franz Kafka. And his works were always anchored in the Central European region.

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.

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.

Lying can never save us from another lie.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

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

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.

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

The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.

Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have - by disrupting that order - a way of surprising.

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.

Hope is a feeling that life and work have meaning. You either have it or you don't, regardless of the state of the world that surrounds you.

Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.