The kind of hope that I often think about…I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we d….

If by believing you mean praying to an anthropomorphic deity who created the world and half controls it and half observes it, then I am probably not ….

I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to plac….

Nothing is more powerful than individuals acting out of their own conscience..

Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed..

If every day a man takes orders in silence from an incompetent superior, if every day he solemnly performs ritual acts which he privately finds ridic….

Every consession gives rise to further concessions, we cannot back down, because behind us there is only an abyss, we must keep our promises and dema….

We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly impossible to become a reality..

I am not an optimist, because I am not sure that everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist, because I am not sure that everything ends badly. I just….

We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought..

A state that denies its citizens their basic rights becomes a danger to its neighbors as well: internal arbitrary rule will be reflected in arbitrary….

The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. ….

It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs..

Truth and love will overcome lies and hatred..

Human rights are universal and indivisible. Human freedom is also indivisible: if it is denied to anyone in the world, it is therefore denied, indire….

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side..

You do not become a ''dissident'' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense ….

Courage means going against majority opinion in the name of the truth..

Without commonly shared and widely entrenched moral values and obligations, neither the law, nor democratic government, nor even the market economy w….

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..

Follow the man who seeks the truth; run from the man who has found it..