361 Quotes by Czechoslovakian authors

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From tavern banter to mountain hush, Czechoslovakian wisdom favors wry understatement, a tender eye for the absurd, and resilience without fanfare. History presses close, yet humor tugs the sleeve; freedom appears as responsibility, love as steadfastness, truth as a quiet stubbornness. Prague courtyards and Tatra paths lend their textures: cobbles, linden shade, winter light. The language turns on sharp proverbs and literary mischief, mingling skepticism toward power with compassion for ordinary lives, finding dignity in small gestures and hard-earned clarity.

See the complete list of authors from Czech Republic

"Dictators are rulers who always look good until the last ten minutes"

Jan Masaryk, Diplomat

"Great God of the Ants, thou hast granted victory to thy servants. I appoint thee honorary Colonel"

Karel Capek, Writer

"Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy"

Milan Kundera, Writer

"Great is the victory, but the friendship of all is greater"

Emil Zatopek, Athlete

"Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it"

Milan Kundera, Writer

"Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary"

Milan Kundera, Writer

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting"

Milan Kundera, Writer

"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out"

Vaclav Havel, Leader

"Men, today we die a little"

Emil Zatopek, Athlete

"Whether or not we believe in survival of consciousness after death, reincarnation, and karma, it has very serious implications for our behavior"

Stanislav Grof, Psychologist

"If you saw a dog going to be crushed under a car, wouldn't you help him?"

Oskar Schindler, Businessman

"Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray"

Milan Kundera, Writer

"Nudity is the uniform of the other side... Nudity is a shroud"

Milan Kundera, Writer

"Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end"

Milan Kundera, Writer

"How goodness heightens beauty!"

Milan Kundera, Writer

"All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual"

Milan Kundera, Writer

"If you have sacrificed my nation to preserve the peace of the world, I will be the first to applaud you. But if not, gentlemen, God help your souls"

Jan Masaryk, Diplomat

"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"

Vaclav Havel, Leader

"The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both"

Vaclav Havel, Leader

"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"

Vaclav Havel, Leader

"When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete"

Vaclav Havel, Leader

"Lying can never save us from another lie"

Vaclav Havel, Leader

"If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to experience a different life, run a marathon"

Emil Zatopek, Athlete

"You still stand watch, O human star, burning without a flicker, perfect flame, bright and resourceful spirit. Each of your rays, a great idea - O torch which passes from hand to hand, from age to age, world without end"

Karel Capek, Writer

"Be these people either Conservatives or Socialists, Yellows or Reds, the most important thing is - and that is the point I want to stress - that all of them are right in the plain and moral sense of the word"

Karel Capek, Writer

"Consciousness after death demonstrates the possibility of consciousness operating independently of the body"

Stanislav Grof, Psychologist

"A radical inner transformation and rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current global crisis brought on by the dominance of the Western mechanistic paradigm"

Stanislav Grof, Psychologist

"I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system"

Oskar Schindler, Businessman

"I didn't have to undergo reconstructive surgery"

Eva Herzigova, Model

"I'm lucky, I don't like sweets, not even chocolate"

Eva Herzigova, Model

"Yes, I was really good in physics and in math"

Eva Herzigova, Model

"Now, after the communist take-over in 1948, the amount of feature films produced dwindled to three a year, while the school was, you know, every year another three, four, five students"

Milos Forman, Director

"You know what happened, you know, in 1938: France, England, you know, just sold out Czechoslovakia to Hitler"

Milos Forman, Director

"My acting coach makes the impossible accessible"

Karolina Kurkova, Model

"It's a very hard and competitive business in which you have to fight every day in order to impose yourself"

Karolina Kurkova, Model

"For God is my witness that I neither preached, affirmed, nor defended them, though they say that I did"

Jan Hus, Philosopher

"I will only speak off the record about Debra Winger"

Karel Reisz, Director

"Learn from the past, look to the future, but live in the present"

Petra Nemcova, Model

"I still speak Czech with my parents because I was born there"

Martina Hingis, Athlete

"We are the party of the Czechoslovak proletariat and our general headquarters are in Moscow"

Klement Gottwald, Politician

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