Fewer still will recall his later insights into the difficulty of transferring Western-style democracy to other cultures, and what he thought we should do to help.
There can be no greater contrast than that between the Czech champion of individual freedoms and the North Korean tyrant whose rule doomed millions. Yet Havel understood that no despotism is permanent and that brave individuals can surmount overwhelming odds.
I first met Havel when I lived in Prague in 1968 during the Prague Spring. Havel insisted, contrary to many of his fellow intellectuals, that the totalitarian communist system couldn't be reformed, but must be overturned.
After the 1968 invasion, he was shadowed, harassed, forbidden to publish, and repeatedly jailed. When I visited him in 1973 at his country home in northern Bohemia, the secret police had built a shack opposite the front gate to watch all his movements.
Yet he wrote - and smuggled abroad for publication - such seminal essays as The Power of the Powerless. That essay argued that even an ordinary person could help crack the facade of totalitarianism by publicly rejecting the constant lies upon which such systems are based.
Of course, the price for "living in truth" was high, not just in jail time, but in punishment of dissidents' families. In North Korea, the price is clearly too high for real opposition to form - for now.
Yet, even though only a few thousand Czechoslovaks supported Havel's Charter 77 movement, they inspired opposition elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Although many in the West thought communism was immutable, Havel argued that brittle totalitarian regimes would crumble once they began cracking. The cracks would emerge, he said, once people stopped believing the lies they'd been fed.
