by Josef Zbořil
- "The less the state is required to have a say in everyday economic affairs, the better." — Václav Havel, Summer Meditations, p. 78.
- "[A] functioning market economy can never guarantee any genuine social justice. They point out that people have, and always will have, different degrees of industriousness, talent, and, last but not least, luck. Obviously, social justice in the sense of social equality is something the market system cannot, by its very nature, deliver." — Václav Havel, Summer Meditations, p. 17.
- [A]ll of us... face one fundamental task from which all else should follow. That task is one of resisting vigilantly...the power of ideologies... bureaucracy, artificial languages and political slogans. We must resist.... the wellspring of totalitarian thought." — Václav Havel, Summer Meditations, p. 84.
Václav Havel in 2003. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
November 2019 will mark the 30-year anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in former Czechoslovakia, led by the dissident author and playwright, the late Václav Havel (1936-2011), who subsequently became the first president of what became the Czech Republic. Havel's works reflected the evils of Communism and its inversion and twisting of morality.
In an address to the US Congress in February 1990, Havel said:
"The Communist type of totalitarian system ... unintentionally... has given us something positive: a special capacity to look, from time to time, somewhat further than someone who has not undergone this bitter experience. A person who cannot move and live a normal life because he is pinned under a boulder has more time to think about his hopes than someone who is not trapped in this way... We too can offer something to you: our experience and the knowledge that has come from it."
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