Where dissent does have an impact, it tends also to be dangerous: think Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Vaclav Havel.
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Despite the difficulties surrounding the election, neither analyst said Mr Havel's retirement was an insurmountable obstacle.
And Mr Havel, however eloquent his pleas for discussion and consensus, has failed to displace it.
Yet in some respects Mr Havel, at home, has more recently been a failure.
In other words, Mr Havel spun a good line in well-meaning and unexceptionable waffle.
Now 63, Mr Havel has kept his modesty, wit and sense of the absurd.
Most strikingly, Mr Klaus is at loggerheads with Mr Havel, once his ally against communism.
His backers saw Mr Havel's hand in their man's fall, which Mr Havel denies.
Anyone regarding Mr Havel as too idealistic or too Bohemian for grubby politics soon learned otherwise.
Here Mr Havel evens the score with several courteous but deadly thrusts of his own.
Mr Havel is sage enough to know that not everyone wants to stand out.
At the end of his presidency, Mr Havel left behind neither heir nor party.
The intended target, they said, was not Mr Zilk: the conspirators were out to discredit President Havel.
"There were four in the northeastern city of Misawa, " said Chris Havel, a spokesman for Oregon's parks department.
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He predicted that either Mr Klaus or Mr Zeman would be "much more political" presidents than Mr Havel.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said he was "deeply saddened" and that Europe owed Havel a "profound debt".
"The Young Prince, " "Red Dawn, " "Stalin's Shadows, " "Late-Socialism, " "Velvet Revolution, " and "Decline" chronicle Havel's personal and political journeys.
The name Charter 88 deliberately echoes that of Charter 77, the Czech dissident movement co-founded by Vaclav Havel.
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To complicate these matters, parliament has to choose a president almost certainly the still much-respected Mr Havel again on January 20th.
Keane begins a few days following Havel's birth, where the true extent of his bourgeois upbringing is fully pronounced.
"Obviously, we have a finite budget, " said Mr. Havel, the parks department spokesman.
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It is certainly true that all this suits politicians who loathe Mr Havel.
His description of the Havel family quarrel over their restored pre-1948 properties is telling and, he suggests, not untypical.
Without Mr Havel, the country's international standing would not be what it is.
Czech politicians, including a former prime minister, Vaclav Klaus, complained that President Havel had damaged relations with a friendly neighbour.
These days, Mr Havel sounds disappointed, even though, after three years in the doldrums, Czech prosperity has been steadily growing again.
The clearest but unkindest explanation for Mr Klaus's conduct is a desire to be noticed more than his predecessor, Vaclav Havel.
But no one in the West views the Solidarity government of Poland or the Havel government in Czechoslovakia as a threat.
Is Mr Havel's beloved dialogue the remedy for global misunderstanding, let alone the right way to get the Czech Republic moving ahead?
My intellectual heroes in my teenage years were not unusual for a young right-winger: George Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel, Friedrich Hayek.
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