Vaclav Havel Quotes

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

I do not favor the gag order.

Repression or oppression never yet succeeded in crushing the truth or redressing a wrong.

Alas, how many have been persecuted for the wrong of having been right?

To silence criticism is to silence freedom.

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

It's a repressive society where you can't be horrible, I'm not horrible, they made me horrible, I'm just honest.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech.

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

The policy of repression of ideas cannot work and has never worked.

History’s most important lesson is that it has not been possible to make coercion compatible with the truth.

It is dangerous to speak the truth to tyrants.

People are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

Every censorship, however good its intent, degenerates inevitably into tyranny.

In a society where the individual is not free to pursue the truth, … there is neither progress, stability, nor security.

It was only a generation ago that we learned that the burning of books may precede the burning of people.

There are men—now in power in this country—who do not respect dissent, who cannot cope with turmoil, and who believe that the people of America are ready to support repression so long as it is done with a quiet voice and a business suit.

… to gag us from speaking truth, and discovering the tyrannies of bad men.

I was imprisoned for talking.

Suppressing ideas never makes them go away.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

It is pretty safe to assume that any given censor is a fool. The very fact that he is a censor indicates that.