Vaclav Havel.
The Vaclav Havel Library Foundation Disturbing the Peace Between 1985 and 1986, Havel conducted a series of interviews with the Czech journalist Karel Hv ížd’ala, who was living in West Germany at the time. In Czech, the resulting book was a kind of confessional autobiography, called Long-Distance Interrogation. The English translation was published in the spring of 1990, and called Disturbing the Peace. From Disturbing the Peace: . . . [T]he kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we don’t. . . . Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. . . . I feel that its deepest roots are in the transcendental, just as the roots of human responsibility are, though of cour...