Leadership Quote by Zuzana Caputova

The line reads like a rebuke delivered in a calm voice, which is exactly why it lands. As a sitting president, Zuzana Caputova isn’t writing poetry; she’s issuing a civic instruction manual for a moment when politics is optimized for performance. “Monologue” is the tell: it’s not just “talking”, it’s talking at people, the rhetorical mode of rallies, outrage TV, and algorithm-friendly certainty. “Dialogue”, by contrast, is slow, risky, and inconvenient. It asks leaders to give up the narcotic of applause and citizens to give up the comfort of total certainty.

The second sentence tightens the screw. She doesn’t propose replacing prejudice with “tolerance”, a word that often means smiling politely while staying unchanged. She replaces it with “effort”, a moral framing that makes listening an action rather than a vibe. “Listen, perceive and understand” is a deliberately staged sequence: not just hearing words, but noticing the person behind them, then doing the harder work of making their reality legible. That triad also implies that prejudice isn’t merely ignorance; it’s a refusal of process.

The context here is Central Europe’s ongoing stress test: nationalism, disinformation, and a post-2015 politics of fear colliding with liberal democratic norms. Caputova’s broader brand has been anti-corruption and rule-of-law seriousness, and this quote fits that posture: non-histrionic, but insistent that democracy is not a shouting match. It’s a discipline.