“True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?”

“At one time, the state of culture in Czechoslovakia was described, rather poignantly, as a 'Biafra of the spirit'. . . I simply do not believe that we have all lain down and died. I see far more than graves and tombstones around me. I see evidence of this in . . . expensive books on astronomy printed in a hundred thousand copies (they would hardly find that many readers in the USA) . . .”

“Vision is not enough, it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs.”

“The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We feel morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension.”

“You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near it.”

“You do not become a ''dissident'' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.”

“The truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why, and how it is said.”