Professor, PhDr. Ivan Vyskočil

"The sixties always come up for a while, but they need a calmness. Because when calmness is missed, the concentration is missed as well. When we get concentration and calmness, the sixties will appear or return. Now that I am leaving AMU, I see how much people need to take their time, to learn waiting and calmness instead of rushing. That's the main issue of the sixties for me: it's about a calmness that has meaning, that knows it's waiting for something and that what it's waiting for is substantial. Because these are things that you constantly suspect, but you have to wait to find out, and it's not just a hunch."

"Communist regimes have mostly lost money because profit allows doubt, risk-taking. And communist regimes usually didn't take risks in business, they wanted to have everything ready from the beginning."

"When I was about fifteen, students in grammar and high schools were organized as Technische Nothilfe. They went to clean up the rubble in Kačerov, on the waterfront, in Vysočany. Everywhere we were delegated as students to look for corpses. I was afraid to find a dead person, but even that happened to me..."

“I thought: ‘Fine, I will work with you, and we will try to do it for as long as they permit us.’ He replied: ‘People don’t come to see the things I do. Let’s do it together in another way so that people start coming.’ I told him: ‘I don’t know how, but we will give it a try. We need to think of a name, we need to give a name to what we do.’ We thus decided that we would call it ‘Text-appeal.’ This word was suggestive of another alluring word, but we meant it seriously with our texts. We wanted to write texts which would be appealing and attractive, which would somehow make an impact on people. To our surprise, it began to be received well.”

“My living at home in Spořilov actually ended with my graduation from secondary school. That was in 1948, which was also the year when the communist coup d’état happened. Not only had my childhood thus come to an end, but also that feeling of freedom. What followed was actually very thrilling. It was a way of keeping one’s character in the time or environment which did not give many opportunities for that. That was at the conservatoire, as well as later at the psychology department of the Faculty of Arts.”

“I remember the war – you had to be careful where and to whom you spoke. The same thing then remained true for the following forty years. When we were at the secondary school, at the drama conservatoire, we held nightly fire watches from the fourth grade onwards. We were divided into groups of three. We always looked forward to it, because we were locked up in the school building at night, and naturally we did some pranks. We went to see the drawing classroom, then we yelled in the hallways, and we simply did things that were not allowed at the time when the teaching staff and the principal and the other students were present, and when we just had to walk the hallways silently and tread lightly. So this was kind of refreshing, in a way. The night fire watches were held in 1943-1944, and night air raids were reported at that time, too, together with some other less pleasant things like having to go to hide in a shelter and dealing with these things, writing reports, and so on. Yes, that was in 1944, and I was fifteen and I was in the fourth and fifth grade of secondary school.”