Václav Havel

Václav Havel (1936–2011) was a Czech dissident playwright who became the first president of post-communist Czechoslovakia after the 1989 Velvet Revolution. In Speeches That Changed The World Kyle’s highlight is from Havel’s 1990 New Year’s address, where he names the lasting wound of the totalitarian years as moral rather than material — “a contaminated moral environment,” the habit of “saying something different from what we thought.” It reads the Totalitarianism entry in the anthology as a story about conscience and complicity.

Where this appears

• Speeches That Changed The World — “We live in a contaminated moral environment… we became used to saying something different from what we thought.”