'Vaclav Havel: The Playwright as President'

Speech given at City University of New York, Graduate Center, New York 20 September 2002

If you will allow me, I will at last try to gain some distance from myself and attempt to formulate three of my old certainties, or rather my old observations, that my sojourn in the world of high politics has only confirmed:

1) If humanity is to survive and avoid new catastrophes, then the global political order has to be accompanied by a sincere and mutual respect among the various spheres of civilization, culture, nations or continents, and by their honest effort to seek and find those values or basic moral imperatives that they have in common, and to build them into the foundations of their co-existence in this globally connected world.

2) Evil must be confronted in its womb and, if it can't be done otherwise, then it has to be dealt with by the use of force. If the immensely smart and expensive modern weaponry must be used, let it be used in such a way that does not harm civilian populations. If this is not possible, then the billions spent on those weapons will be wasted.

3) If we examine all the problems facing the world today, be they economic, social, ecological, or general problems of civilization, we will always _ whether we want to or not _ come up against the problem of whether a course of action is decent or not, or whether, from the long-term planetary point of view, it is responsible. The moral order and its sources, human rights and the sources of people's right to human rights, human responsibility and its origins, human conscience and the penetrating view of that from which nothing can be hidden with a curtain of noble words _ these are, in my deepest convictions and in all my experience, the most important political themes of our time.

The path of reason, peace, and justice means a lot of hard work, self-denial ...