Quote by Václav Havel: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.”

Hope is usually misunderstood as optimism — the belief that things will work out. Havel says real hope has nothing to do with outcomes. It is the conviction that what you are doing matters, that acting rightly has value even if it fails. This makes hope something you can hold onto even in the darkest situations.

Havel spoke these words in a 1986 interview with Karel Hvížďala while under house arrest and surveillance by the Czechoslovak secret police. The interview was later published as Disturbing the Peace. He was living with the real possibility that his activism would never succeed in his lifetime, and he was articulating why he continued anyway.

Czech playwright, essayist, and dissident who became the last president of Czechoslovakia and first president of the Czech Republic. His essays and plays — including The Garden Party — challenged totalitarianism with moral clarity, and he spent years imprisoned for his political writings.