People like me who were engaging in brinkmanship with the party economic bosses and the open dissidents who were being arrested were pursuing a common goal in different ways.
I never intended to be a politician or office-seeker.
Then in 1969 I spent the spring term at Cornell University in New York. The invasion of August 1968 had already happened but the hardline regime took several months to crack down on dissidents.
not a scientific body capable of accurately assessing the facts about global warming.
You cannot have democratic accountability in anything bigger than a nation state.
EU didn't advance our [Eastern Europe] democracy by a single millimeter.
Communism was replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism.
The largest threat to freedom democracy the market economy and prosperity is no longer socialism. It is instead the ambitious arrogant unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.
By the time I returned to Czechoslovakia I had an understanding of the principles of the market.
I do not consider the Lisbon Treaty to be a good thing for Europe for the freedom of Europe or for the Czech Republic.
I also helped write the five-page statement of principles that Civic Forum issued in late November. That was the first public expression of what the new government wanted to do.
Other top-level politicians do not express their global warming doubts because a whip of political correctness strangles their voice.
I don't think there is any global warming. I don't see the statistical data for that.
Common foreign policy is completely unnecessary. The various European countries have widely differing priorities goals and prejudices. It would be wrong to force them all to follow the same course.
Environmentalism is a dangerous ideology endangering human freedom.
I was paid to read Western economic texts. In a way the regime paid for their own undermining.
To talk about planning an economic system is to talk in old terms and I find myself sometimes having to teach Westers about what the market really means.
What we want is to establish the rules of a market economy - not to plan its outcome.
What is concisely referred to as global warming is a fatal mistake of the present time.
It is what makes the reform process an art not just a science. You have to develop a strategy that tells you what reform measures you should follow and in what sequence.