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"I also helped write the five-page statement of principles that Civic Forum issued in late November. That was the first public expression of what the new government wanted to do."
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"We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels."
"It is from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power. Only the strong can be free. And only the productive can be strong."
"The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative."
"What I want to do is create more taxpayers, not more taxes."
"I never knew a government yet that wanted to do anything."
"The Constitution says that government isn't supposed to be infusing religion into our society, and so I asked to have that upheld."
"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world."
"A world technology means either a world government or world suicide."
"Sometimes people need a kick in the pants to get them to do what they would be doing if government weren't there as a perpetual parent."
Explore more quotes by Vaclav Klaus
"To talk about planning an economic system is to talk in old terms, and I find myself sometimes having to teach Westers about what the market really means."
"To pursue a so-called Third Way is foolish. We had our experience with this in the 1960s when we looked for a socialism with a human face. It did not work, and we must be explicit that we are not aiming for a more efficient version of a system that has failed."
"The events in the square, of course, made a deep impression on me and many other parents."
"Then in 1969, I spent the spring term at Cornell University in New York. The invasion of August 1968 had already happened, but the hardline regime took several months to crack down on dissidents."
"By the time I returned to Czechoslovakia, I had an understanding of the principles of the market."
"People like me who were engaging in brinkmanship with the party economic bosses and the open dissidents who were being arrested were pursuing a common goal in different ways."
"We will also allow state companies to sell shares to their workers and will pass a law allowing citizens to start companies of their own with no limits on the number of employees or on the firm's output."
"Privatization of the state-owned economy is not yet on the agenda. We cannot do it immediately; my colleagues would not agree to it. But we must put all forms of ownership on an equal footing immediately and let different types of ownership compete with the state firms."
"I was paid to read Western economic texts. In a way, the regime paid for their own undermining."
"It is what makes the reform process an art, not just a science. You have to develop a strategy that tells you what reform measures you should follow and in what sequence."
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