Vaclav Havel on "Hope"

We have a great admiration for the change agents and risk takers who are perpetually unsatisfied with the status quo. In his book Big Citizenship: How Pragmatic Idealism Can Bring Out The Best In America, City Year co-founder and founder of Be the Change, Inc., Alan Khazei recounts his experiences traveling the world and meeting similar game-changers. He searches for a common denominator among the civic leaders he meets and finds one overwhelming characteristic present in all of them, "a commitment to the greater good and unique brand of hope." Khazei credits Vaclav Havel with best summarizing this idea. It's an incredible passage:

"Either we have hope within us or we don't, it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation...Hope in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well or the willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather, an ability to work for something good because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed...Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense no matter how it turns out." - (Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Huizdala; New York: Knopf, 1990)