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Quotes by Czechoslovakian Authors
"Many legitimate forms of ownership, mainly cooperative and communal, had not been used to any effective extent mainly because of the imposition of Stalinist restrictions."
"It is up to us to make the right choice and the right decisions."
"Wherever on this planet ideals of personal freedom and dignity apply, there you will find the cultural inheritance of England."
"Man will never be enslaved by machinery if the man tending the machine be paid enough."
"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."
"Whether they knew of didn't know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn't know. (...) by beating himself on the chest and proclaiming, "My conscience is clear! I did not know! I was a believer!" Isn't his "I did not know I was a believer!" at the very root of his irreparable guilt?"
"What I love the most about modeling is that it opens you a lot of different doors of opportunities and takes you to many different places, which then put you in touch with various people and cultures."
"I basically started playing violin at the age of six. That lasted about three years because my previous teacher died and the second teacher didn't really know how to successfully get me going."
"There is an urgent need for a radical revision of our current concepts of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to matter and the brain."
"Flying is awful, there's nothing to do when you're up in the air. I bloat up, my skin gets dry, and when we hit turbulence, I'm terrified."
"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 think theatre should always be somewhat suspect."
"The British cinema had been very dull and conformist."
"I did extensive, extensive recordings and made a classical CD-ROM set, which is still on the market. For ten years, it was by itself as the cream of the crop of samples."
"What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating."
"There are people who can start having very powerful experiences without taking psychedelics. It can happen against their will. This is a universal phenomenon."
"Honestly, I'm more into the computer, the Internet, and checking out scores or the news."
"So I am one of those bass players who can do something and musically, it was back then and now it is even more, if you noticed on the new album, I am not playing all the time anymore."
"Socialism is good when it comes to wages, but it tells me nothing when it comes to other questions in life that are more private and painful, for which I must seek answers elsewhere."
"I remember in 1968 when we were in Cannes, in the festival, and we were supposed to be there 10 days, and the second day the festival collapsed because the French, you know, film-makers raised the red flag in the festival and ended the festival."
"So I left with Jean Claude and went to Paris, so when the Russians came to Prague, I was in Paris."
"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."
"Too much faith is the worst ally. When you believe in something literally, through your faith you'll turn it into something absurd. One who is a genuine adherent, if you like, of some political outlook, never takes its sophistries seriously, but only its practical aims, which are concealed beneath these sophistries. Political rhetoric and sophistries do not exist, after all, in order that they be believed; rather, they have to serve as a common and agreed upon alibi. Foolish people who take them in earnest sooner or later discover inconsistencies in them, begin to protest, and finish finally and infamously as heretics and apostates. No, too much faith never brings anything good."
"No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we'd rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn't know how to deal with women."
"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."
"Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance."
"I tell you, in my opinion, the cornerstone of democracy is free press - that's the cornerstone."
"Why should I practice running slow? I already know how to run slow. I want to learn to run fast."
"Until then her view of time was the present moving forward and devouring the future; she either feared its swiftness (when she was awaiting something difficult) or rebelled at its slowness (when she was awaiting something fine). Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past. She sees a young man disconnecting himself from her life and going away, forevermore out of her reach. Mesmerized, all she can do is watch this piece of her life move off; all she can do is watch it and suffer. She is experiencing a brand-new feeling called nostalgia."
"I was coming back from Tel Aviv recently, and we had forty minutes of bumps. I got so scared I grabbed a paper and pen and put them in my pocket, just in case we crashed and I needed to write a letter from wherever we landed."
"If one can stick to the training throughout the many long years, then will power is no longer a problem. It's raining? That doesn't matter. I am tired? That's besides the point. It's simply that I just have to."
"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."
"Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary."
"That's one of the reasons I moved to Florida. Of course, the main reason is the weather and the training. But there's more jealousy in Switzerland because it's so little and they don't have so many athletes."
"Because beauty isn't enough, there must be something more."
"Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka."
"When I was young, I was too slow. I thought I must learn to run fast by practicing to run fast, so I ran 100 meters fast 20 times. Then I came back, slow, slow, slow."
"I would like to see it go back to the wood racquets. To see the touch put back in tennis."
"There's a great danger in making this seem more important than it is, this whole Free Cinema thing."
"For us she is not the iron lady. She is the kind, dear Mrs. Thatcher."
"Well, I wouldn't say that this experience had any influence on my decision to do this film about Andy, because Andy was apolitical. Andy was never political."
"The events in the square, of course, made a deep impression on me and many other parents."
"Music is another great pleasure of life. I like all sorts."
"I don't think it's a low point being in the finals of the French Open, three points away from the victory."
"The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility."
"Isn't that exactly the definition of biography? An artificial logic imposed on an 'incoherent succession of images'?"
"A style is not a matter of camera angles or fancy footwork, it's an expression, an accurate expression of your particular opinion."
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