Vaclav Havel Quotes

Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

When everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking clearly.

Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

The man who accepts opinions because they have been entertained by distinguished people, is a mental snob.

The sheep-people don't think for themselves anymore. You can say anything and it's the gospel truth and they don't have to go research it or anything, and they believe everything the news tells them. People don't go and do their own investigations if it's relationships or politics or anything.

Human beings never think for themselves; they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

As soon as by one's own propaganda even a glimpse of right on the other side is admitted, the cause for doubting one's own right is laid.

I always find myself very distrustful of intense crowd phenomena, and I think those are things that we should always try to question, especially critically.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.

Both the historian and the novelist view history as the struggle of a tiny minority, able and determined to make judgments, which is up against a vast and densely packed majority of the blind, who are led by their instincts and unable to think for themselves.

We are the most amazing creatures that this world has ever produced, but we seem to also have this herd mentality; we seem to be the most stupid, also.

In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform.

Here is a man with the greatest intellect in Europe, and yet he debases it by simply following majorities and the crowd.

Be more severe to ideas than to actions; do not over look the strength of the bad cause or the weakness of the good.

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

When a man can take a poll and tell what everybody is thinking, that means nobody is really thinking anymore.

Well, a general danger of punditry is that there's very little incentive to change your position or admit error. If you reverse your position, the people who backed you before will be unhappy, but a lot of the people who now agree with you will still pillory you.

It's a law of our natures, especially when the political fit is on us, to applaud where we already approve, and deride where we don't.

The message bombarding young adults from the leftist cultural elite is clear; you should think for yourself... by adopting my beliefs as your own.