Václav Havel, the former President of the Czech Republic, was born on October 5, 1936 in Prague. He was an author, poet, playwright, dissident and statesman. Havel was increasingly persecuted and eventually banned from public cultural life after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1977, he became one of the principal spokesmen for Charter 77, a human-rights initiative demanding that the Czechoslovak government honor the international agreements on human rights that it had signed. In his essay, The Power of the Powerless, he developed the idea that authoritarian systems depend not only upon force but upon the participation and acquiescence of ordinary people. A few wise thoughts from one of the few creative artists to have become a political leader: "Hope is a state of mind, not of the world." “Keep the company of those who seek the truth - run from those who have found it.”