Friends of the Václav Havel Library

With the honours to consider as friends of the Václav Havel Library projects in the U.S. among others:

Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State and Ambassador to the United Nations under President Clinton, Principal in the Albright Group, Diplomat
Thomas Dine, CEO, Jewish Community Federation
Vartan Gregorian, President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York
Marcel Guarnizo, Reverend, EICEE, Schloss Neuwaldegg
John Shattuck, CEO, John F. Kennedy Library Foundation
Craig Stapleton, former US Ambassador to the Czech Republic, US Ambassador to France
Jan Švejnar, Everett E. Berg Professor of Business Administration, Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy, University of Michigan

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Letters to Olga – essays written in prison, letter

„I am a child of the age of conceptual, rather than mystical, thought and therefore my god as well – if I am compelled to speak of him (which I do very unwillingly) – must appear as something terribly abstract, vague and unattractive. But it appears so only to someone I try to tell about him – the experience itself is quite vivid, intimate and particular, perhaps (…) more lively than for someone whose “normal” God is provided with all the appropriate attributes (which oddly enough can alienate more often than drawing one closer). And something else that is typical of my god: he is a master of waiting, and in doing so he frequently unnerves me. It is as though he set up various possibilities around me and then waited silently to see what I would do. (…) His Last Judgment is taking place now, continuously, always – and yet it is always the last: nothing that has happened can ever un-happen, everything remains in the “memory of Being” – and I too remain there – condemned to be with myself till the end of time – just as I am and just as I make myself.“

Václav Havel:
Letters to Olga – essays written in prison, letter
August 7, 1980

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