To pursue a so-called Third Way is foolish. We had our experience with this in the 1960s when we looked for a socialism with a human face. It did not work, and we must be explicit that we are not aiming for a more efficient version of a system that has failed.

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.

By the time I returned to Czechoslovakia, I had an understanding of the principles of the market.

That means following a very restrictive fiscal and monetary policy which will squeeze the monopolies and cut their subsidies. On the micro level we will allow other economic agents, both domestic and foreign, to compete with them.

The events in the square, of course, made a deep impression on me and many other parents.

We must have the time to create strict rules so that property is not sold by Communist managers for a low price. They often get payments under the table to sell to the first bidder. This does not build public support for a market economy.

Nevertheless, there is another threat on the horizon. I see this threat in environmentalism which is becoming a new dominant ideology, if not a religion. Its main weapon is raising the alarm and predicting the human life endangering climate change based on man-made global warming.

I never intended to be a politician or office-seeker.

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.

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.

To pursue a so-called Third Way is foolish. We had our experience with this in the 1960s when we looked for a socialism with a human face. It did not work, and we must be explicit that we are not aiming for a more efficient version of a system that has failed.

We will also allow state companies to sell shares to their workers and will pass a law allowing citizens to start companies of their own with no limits on the number of employees or on the firm's output.

Privatization of the state-owned economy is not yet on the agenda. We cannot do it immediately; my colleagues would not agree to it. But we must put all forms of ownership on an equal footing immediately and let different types of ownership compete with the state firms.

What we want is to establish the rules of a market economy - not to plan its outcome.

I was paid to read Western economic texts. In a way, the regime paid for their own undermining.

We served on the editorial board of a literary monthly called Face in 1968 and 1969. He was a young writer, and I was also interested in broad cultural issues. We agreed on all major issues and became friends.

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.

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.

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 live in Europe and care about democracy and sovereignty of nation states there.

I'm absolutely convinced that the very small global warming we are experiencing is the result of natural causes. It's a cyclical phenomenon in the history of the Earth. The role of man is very small, almost negligible.

It is obvious that the monetary union among 17 very different European countries does not work. As an economist, I know that the Eurozone is not an optimum currency area, as defined in economic theory.

The attempts to command the climate and decide about the temperature on our planet are wrong and arrogant. I wrote a book about it which was published in English under the title 'Blue Planet in Green Shackles.'

Those of us who lived under communism for most of our lives were looking toward the Western world because of its values, emphasis on democracy, individual liberties and freedom, and economic prosperity.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

In my fifty years of experience and memory, I have seen the most amazing increase in the standard of living of a people ever achieved anywhere in the world. This is why I am so sure that our system of free competition and industrial development is sound and must be preserved.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

It's been my experience that every time I think I know where it's at, it's usually somewhere else.

The experience of learning how to get straight to the core of a problem proved to be of immense value later when I had a long succession of responsibilities in large, complex government departments.

I view life as a learning experience. It is not so much all about music; it is about what happens when you are doing the music.

I feel, sometimes, as the renaissance man must have felt in finding new riches at every point and in the certainty that unexplored areas of knowledge and experience await at every turn.