Jakub Szántó

"I just don't imagine automatically helping people who are fleeing their homes, for example from the war in Syria, that we will simply accept 50 000, 100 000 refugees here. I don't think so. I think there's a relatively large space in between giving up on them altogether and giving them our living room. And I'm proud to be from a country that does that. I have mapped Czech humanitarian and development aid to Syrian refugees and poor Jordanians in Jordan quite extensively and in detail in the five years I have been in the Middle East. And what we did there is just fantastic. And we can really be proud, because the numbers of people who have been helped by our targeted aid, specific projects, specific things that can be touched, not just paying the bills, as richer countries do, the numbers of people who have been helped by the Czech Republic are in the tens of thousands. And that's really not a small number for a country that can't spend that much."

"Václav Havel is definitely a man who belongs among the giants of Czech history, a man who, by combining his strength with his human weaknesses, is terribly interesting. That he is not a man of granite, but that he is a man who had a lot of human weaknesses. That all of this combined, and if I compare him to, say, Lech Walesa, or Lansbergis, the great figures of the anti-communist revolutions, he had something extra, and that was that he was a playwright who had a sense of a certain theatricality. And I know also from witnesses that he really took care, he paid a lot of attention to, let's say, the dramatic effect, the drama of the politics. In that, I think, he was quite exceptional."

"I think the compromise that was chosen in our country was not entirely appropriate. And that indeed the, I won't say Stalinist... rather perhaps Brezhnev-style leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, the KSČ, which has been transformed into what is today the KSČM, the pure fact that somebody can be proudly here and quite brazenly act even as a deputy chairman of the Chamber of Deputies with that name Communist, is something that was not good and it was quite a fundamental mistake. If the party had been called the Democratic Left, or whatever, and the same people had been there, it might not have made such a difference in reality, but simply the fact that there remains the possibility, even though we have a law that is theoretically supposed to combat the promotion of ideologies that lead to human rights abuses and so on, such as Nazism and of course Communism, we are essentially denying our own legal order by the existence of such a party."

"I've read a lot about terrorism, and I have to say that it's a phenomenon that in a way, it sounds silly, never ceases to fascinate me. It's just philosophically and historically an activity that's quite different from war, where actually the means are very similar and where the victims are very identical, but where the murderous violence, as opposed to the murder that's against that particular person, this anonymous violence, or violence against people that I know nothing about, is quite different from war. The arrogance, the hatred, the condescension towards innocent victims. That those people just deserve to die because I decided to do so for some reason, or those people, those victims, have to endure it as part of some higher idea, is just a thing or a philosophical concept that doesn't give me sleep."