Quote of the Day (Vaclav Havel, on ‘A New Moral Effort’ vs. ‘The Dictatorship of Money’)

“The dictatorship of money, of profit, of constant economic growth, and the necessity, flowing from all that, of plundering the earth without regard for what will be left in a few decades, along with everything else related to the materialistic obsessions of this world, from the flourishing of selfishness to the need to evade personal responsibility by becoming part of the herd, and the general inability of human conscience to keep pace with the inventions of reason, right up to the alienation created by the sheer size of modern institutions—all of these are phenomena that cannot effectively be confronted except through a new moral effort, that is, through a transformation of the spirit and the human relationship to life and the world.” — Playwright, essayist, dissident, and first President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel (1936-2011), “Paying Back the West,” The New York Review of Books, Sept. 23, 1999