Vaclav Havel was more than just the president of Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic. His humanism and value-based leadership calls others to emulate his sense of duty and responsibility to higher standards as a politician and leader. He feels we have a human responsibility to self, other, and planet.

Biography can be a way into Havel’s life, but reading his writing speaks to the better-self in each of us. The biography, Havel: A Life, By Michael Zantovsky is reviewed by Paul Wilson in the New York Review of Books review, titled Vaclav Havel; What He Inspired.

Reading Vaclav Havel by David Danaher, provides us with a literary perspective on Havel’s writing.

Selected Essays, Letters, and Speeches
The excerpts below are from Havel’s essays, speeches, and letters, available on the Vaclav Havel website.

From the introduction to Power of the Powerless:

Zbygniew Bujak, a Solidarity activist, “This essay reached us in the Ursus factory, in 1979, at a point when we felt we were at the end of the road. Inspired by KOR [the Polish Workers’ Defense Committee], we had been speaking on the shop floor, talking to people, participating in public meetings, trying to speak the truth about the factory, the country, and politics. There came a moment when people thought we were crazy. Why were we doing this? Why were we taking such risks? Not seeing any immediate and tangible results, we began to doubt the purposefulness of what we were doing. Shouldn’t we be coming up with other methods, other ways?
“Then came the essay by Havel. Reading it gave us the theoretical underpinnings for our activity. It maintained our spirits; we did not give up, and a year later, in August 1980, it became clear that the party apparatus and the factory management were afraid of us. We mattered. And the rank and file saw us as leaders of the movement. When I look at the victories of Solidarity, and of Charter 77, I see in them an astonishing fulfillment of the prophecies and knowledge contained in Havel’s essay.”

From an Open Letter to Gustav Husak:

Vaclav Havel in this open letter asks what happens when a government measures well-being of its citizens in limited self-serving terms. “ . . . to mean something more, a genuine state of mind in society? Supposing we start to inquire about more durable, perhaps subtler and more imponderable, but nonetheless significant factors, such as what, by way of genuine personal, human experience lies hidden behind all the figures? Supposing we ask, for example, what has been done for the moral and spiritual revival of society, for the enhancement of the truly human dimensions of life, for the elevation of man to a higher degree of dignity, for his truly free and authentic assertion in this world? What do we find when we thus turn our attention from the mere outward manifestations to their inner causes and consequences, their connections and meanings, in a word, to that less obvious plane of reality where those manifestations might actually acquire a general human meeting?…

…Most people are loath to spend their days in ceaseless conflict with authority, especially when it can only end in the defeat of the isolated individual. So why not do what is required of you? It costs you nothing, and in time you cease to bother about it. It is not worth a moment’s thought.

Despair leads to apathy, apathy to conformity, conformity to routine performance—which is then quoted as evidence of “mass political involvement.” All this goes to make up the contemporary concept of “normal” behavior—a concept which is, in essence, deeply pessimistic.

The more completely one abandons any hope of general reform, any interest in supra-personal goals and values, or any chance of exercising influence in an “outward” direction, the more his energy is diverted in the direction of least resistance, i.e., “inwards:” People today are preoccupied far more with themselves, their families and their homes. It is there that they find rest, there that they can forget the world’s folly and freely exercise their creative talents. They fill their homes with all kinds of appliances and pretty things, they try to improve their accommodations, they try to make life pleasant for themselves, building cottages, looking after their cars, taking more interest in food and clothing and domestic comfort. In short, they turn their main attention to the material aspects of their private lives…”

From Havel’s address at Harvard University, Cambridge, June 8, 1995:

“Many of the great problems we face today, as far as I understand them, have their origin in the fact that this global civilization, though in evidence everywhere, is no more than a thin veneer over the sum total of human awareness, if I may put it that way. This civilization is immensely fresh, young, new, and fragile, and the human spirit has accepted it with dizzying alacrity, without itself changing in any essential way. Humanity has evolved over long millennia in all manner of civilizations and cultures that gradually, and in very diverse ways, shaped our habits of mind, our relationship to the world, our models of behaviour [sic] and the values we accept and recognize. In essence, this new, single epidermis of world civilization merely covers or conceals the immense variety of cultures, of peoples, of religious worlds, of historical traditions and historically formed attitudes, all of which in a sense lie “beneath” it. At the same time, even as the veneer of world civilization expands, this “underside” of humanity, this hidden dimension of it, demands more and more clearly to be heard and to be granted a right to life.”