Vaclav Havel Quotes

Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.

Alfred Nobel believed that social changes are brought about slowly, and sometimes by indirect means.

We accept the world in order to change it. If you do not accept, then what are you going to change?

But the history of the changes produced by a universal idea is not a history of changes in the individual, but of changes brought about by the successive efforts of millions of individuals in the course of many generations.

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.

By a series of violent shocks, the nations in succession have struggled to shake off the Past, to reverse the action of Time and the verdict of success, and to rescue the world from the reign of the dead.

He who puts out his hand to stop the wheel of history will have his fingers crushed.

I believe that we must maintain pride in the knowledge that the actions we take, based on our own decisions and choices as individuals, link directly to the magnificent challenge of transforming human history.

A great revolution in just one single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a society and, further, will enable a change in the destiny of humankind.

Reform is China's second revolution.

We are at the precipice of great transformation within our culture and government.

It is in revolutionary periods that the culmination of previous trends and the beginning of new ones appear.

We are redefining and we are restating our socialism in terms of the scientific revolution.

Only through perils and upheavals can Nations be brought to further developments. May the present upheavals lead to a better world.

Men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives.

The country is called to the practice of new customs. The walls and surfaces must be cleaned. But minds too must be cleansed, for that is where the error was born.

The sudden political revolutions which strike the historian most forcibly are often the least important. The great revolutions are those of manners and thought. The true revolutions, those which transform the destinies of people, are most frequently accomplished so slowly that the historians can hardly point to their beginnings. Scientific revolutions are by far the most important.

Reform is born of need, not pity. No vital movement of the people has worked down, for good or evil; fermented, instead, it carried up the heaving, cloggy mass.

Human society cannot, be changed in a year.

… science is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge, and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilization.

. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.

In order to make the changes work, the majority of members of society that has entered into the changes must wake up every morning with a feeling of the great historical moment, with the feeling of something big and extraordinary.

I want a real revolution, a real change in society: society, a great organic mass of well-regulated forces used for the bringing-about a happy life for all.

I feel like a serious revolution needs to take place in order for human beings to evolve in a way where we can truly exist as a society.

Work for legal reform takes place only within the framework of the social form created by the last revolution.