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Quotes by Czechoslovakian Authors
"We're constantly buying airplane tickets; we travel on the Concorde."
"It is up to us to make the right choice and the right decisions."
"I would like to see it go back to the wood racquets. To see the touch put back in tennis."
"I love photo sessions. I'm alone, I'm the queen, everyone's taking care of me."
"You can't climb up to the second floor without a ladder. When you set your aim too high and don't fulfill it, then your enthusiasm turns to bitterness. Try for a goal that's reasonable, and then gradually raise it."
"I still speak Czech with my parents because I was born there."
"There is the glamour side of it, which allows you to meet great variety of people with whom you simply can have a good time, but there's also the sad side of it that drags you into a superficial and artificial world."
"A girl who is interested in becoming a model must first accept the fact that she is the product. She must be ready to deal with a lot of rejection."
"That was really so upsetting when you are trying to pass on some very serious knowledge and be basically, treated worse than a student coming off the street because his father pays the tuition. Come on. Give me a break. This is no school. This is a joke."
"Simply enjoy life and the great pleasures that come with it."
"There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight."
"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."
"A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality."
"What has passed is already finished with. What I find more interesting is what is still to come."
"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."
"He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life. But that didn't help: he took no pleasure in looking back, and he did it as seldom as possible."
"I grew up on the tennis court with lots of other kids. There were like 40 kids all afternoon and I was one of the youngest ones, so I always had to chase everybody to keep up."
"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 continued studying by myself in the field of jazz with my own technique of improvisation, walking bass lines, rhythms, all kinds of stuff, which I created for myself."
"The new formula in physics describes humans as paradoxical beings who have two complementary aspects: They can show properties of Newtonian objects and also infinite fields of consciousness."
"Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock."
"There is no roles. No one is keeping any roles. The drummer is also answering everybody and everything. So it is a constant conversation and communication between musicians on an extremely high level with extremely valuable material, motifs, and melodies."
"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."
"My mother's a secretary; my father's an electrician in a mining company."
"That means following a very restrictive fiscal and monetary policy which will squeeze the monopolies and cut their subsidies. On the micro level we will allow other economic agents, both domestic and foreign, to compete with them."
"Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray."
"For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake."
"Laughing deeply is living deeply."
"But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?"
"Music is another great pleasure of life. I like all sorts."
"The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal."
"Consciousness after death demonstrates the possibility of consciousness operating independently of the body."
"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."
"A big element of what they regard as conformity is simply a desire to have an audience."
"The tree of possibilities: life as it reveals itself to a man arriving, astonished, at the threshold of his adult life: an abundant treetop canopy filled with bees singing. And he thinks he understands why she never showed him the letters: she wanted to hear the murmur of the tree by herself, without him, because he, Jean-Marc, represented the abolition of all possibilities, he was the reduction, (even though it was a happy reduction) of her life to a single possibility."
"And think about the precise meaning of that term: a Narcissus is not proud. A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person's eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes nice care of all his mirrors."
"How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more."
"It's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends."
"Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they too, fade away."
"Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal."
"Whether or not we believe in survival of consciousness after death, reincarnation, and karma, it has very serious implications for our behavior."
"Beyond this day, no thinking person could fail to see what would happen."
"Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace."
"I was always at peace because of the way my mom treated me."
"When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete."
"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."
"When I was 4 my mother got divorced and we were very close to each other. I always wanted to be with her. She took me everywhere. When she went for dinner with friends or when they had meetings at the tennis club, I was always there."
"Sometimes I wouldn't give an interview because I didn't have the time or something else was more important. So they come up with a story which I don't think is always true, but they have to sell papers."
"So the whole basis for jazz music is based on the fact that the bass player could not play his instrument."
"To boast of a performance which I cannot beat is merely stupid vanity. And if I can beat it that means there is nothing special about it. What has passed is already finished with. What I find more interesting is what is still to come."
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