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I don't normally start "Death Threads," but this particular man is a deep source of inspiration for so many people, and he has touched my life in a thousand ways since I have lived in the country that he helped to build.
Vaclav Havel was a contrarian, and an absurdist. In many ways, it seemed the last thing he would ever be was an elder statesman. But he served 14 years as the President of the Czech Republic (and of Czechoslovakia), and was the voice and source of moral authority that led the Czechs from the most peaceful revolution in history, into unity with Europe, and back to the economic prosperity of their First Republic. He's the kind of man that history only rarely produces: the embodiment of the will of a people to be free, and to do good.
I have known many people whose lives were touched, both directly indirectly, by his lifework, freeing his people and guiding them into the modern world. Rarely is an unkind work spoken by anyone who lived in his Czech Republic. He was a man, unlike so many before, who did not rule through fear, or through the cowardice and indifference of the people, but galvanized those around him to seek real answers to the problems that they faced. This country, and all countries, could use more men like him, and I thought I would share that impression with you.
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posted
A great man has been lost, but the power of his words lives on.
quote: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.
quote: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.
quote: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.
quote:Hope is a state of mind, not of the world . . . Either we have hope or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.
Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, and orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons . . .
Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather and ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is.
Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
posted
The Art of the Impossible is the only book I bought while in college that I kept through a cross-country move, and three or four other moves since then.
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