A Quote by Tom Stoppard
I just happen to know quite a lot of what happened in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the fall of Communism.
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Who would have predicted... that Dubcek, who brought the tanks in in Czechoslovakia in 1968 is now being proclaimed a hero in Czechoslovakia. Unbelievable.
'2001' is a really interesting movie because it came out in 1968, and everybody thought that that was possible, and look how ridiculous that was. We don't have ships like that, and you know, nobody in 1968 was going, 'Oh, that'll never happen!' But of course it never happened. We're not even close to it.
You know what happened, you know, in 1938: France, England, you know, just sold out Czechoslovakia to Hitler.
Of course we also live in a world of great beauty, sacrificial and passionate love, tenderness, prosperity, courage and joy. But quite a lot of all that seems to happen regardless of the paradigm and the high thoughts of philosophy. It has always happened. It is precisely because it has always happened that we go on wrestling with these issues in the hope that it can happen more often and for more people.
This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where Russia can threaten its neighbors, occupy a capital, overthrow a government, and get away with it. Things have changed.
We wasted a lot of creative energy in that immediate post colonial era, when there was a struggle between, you know, the Cold War between the capitalism and communism. Many writers just wasted their energy and their talent because they want to be ideologically correct and of course all they produced was propaganda.
I didn't want to be thirtysomething and not know what I was going to do. I was quite afraid of that, there were quite a lot of aimless kids around, in that 'other' side of my life, who didn't really know what to do because they always had a bank balance to fall back on and they were quite lost.
I don't really expect anything to happen anyway; if I book a tour, I know it might not happen. I just think about the things that I have got. A lot of good things have happened to me too. It could always be worse.
In Czechoslovakia in 1968, communist reformers appealed to democratic ideals that were deeply rooted in the country's pre-second world war past.
My life lesson is just to be patient and everything will fall in place. Most of what's happened in my life is not to do with me but good people and the way things happened. So I feel it's no use stressing over anything. Let things simply happen.
Bob Gates is really emblematic of the modern CIA. He joins it in 1968, just a day before the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. And, of course, he rises very quickly. In less than six years, he's on the National Security Council staff, at the closing weeks of Richard Nixon's presidency and then on into Gerald Ford.
Between complete socialism and communism there is no difference whatever in my mind.Communism is in fact the completion of socialism; when that ceases to be militant and becomes triumphant, it will be communism.
We are all dangling in mid-process between what already happened (which is just a memory) and what might happen (which is just an idea). Now is the only time anything happens. When we are awake in our lives, we know what's happening. When we're asleep, we don't see what's right in front of us.
Earthquakes just happen. Tornadoes just happen. Your tongue does not just happen to fall into some other girl's mouth!
I know I'm still young and there's a lot of time for things to happen, but sometimes I think there is something about me that's wrong, that I'm not the kind of person anyone can fall in love with, and that I'll always just be alone.
Most argument, and in fact most conflict, has nothing to do with the present. It's always about the past or the future. People can't agree on the details of what has happened or is going to happen. But we rarely know what has happened, and we never know what is going to happen. What is really at dispute is how we will deal with not knowing.
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