“Capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling.”

Where the sole employer is the state, [opposition] means death by slow starvation.

Our differences with [Joseph] Stalin are entirely of a strategical character.

If you cannot convince a Fascist, acquaint his head with the pavement.

If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one’s life, without seeing oneself in the “mirror” of literature?

Life is not an easy matter… You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.

The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship [in the Soviet Union], if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture.

If we close our eyes to the dark sides of the workers’ State which we have helped to create, we shall never reach socialism.

Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full.

City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automation, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.

Only in the Fall of 1924 did [Joseph] Stalin discover that it is especially Russia, as distinguished from other countries, which can by its own forces build up a socialist society.

From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality.

Once again, he who ignores the problems of revolutionary strategy would do better not to talk about revolutions at all.

Where force is necessary, there it must be applied boldly, decisively and completely.

If we had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.

When one runs with the wolves, one must howl with the pack.

Under all conditions, well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points.

I’m really good in a crisis, because I don’t panic.

A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migrant workers in Europe.

All of us living in today’s world are facing an enormous crisis – arguably the greatest that humanity has ever faced

I think writers can respond by writing about the refugee crisis, by looking at problems faced by migrants, by trying hard to portray them as the human beings that they are.

Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great individuals, like great companies, find a way to transform weakness into strength.

A lot of people would say, to be truthful is to tell all, every dalliance, every crisis. They might be right on paper, but in practice, it’s not a great way to go.

Since in a crisis they are usually dense, fatally doing the wrong thing. It is hardly too much to say that most domestic tragedies are caused by the feminine intuition of men and the want of it in women.

The Red List gives all of us a practical tool for raising awareness of the biodiversity crisis and for forging new partnerships within the international community.