“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?”

There is no justice in bureaucracy for the individual, for bureaucracy caters only to itself. One cannot practice the same bureaucracy as one is fighting against.

The main task of Socialism – the organization of Socialist production – remains still in the future.

Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.

In France, the leader of Jacobinism perished on the guillotine; with us, the change of leadership was achieved by means of arrest and banishment. The technique of the process is gentler, but its essence is the same.

Everyone has a right to be stupid, but Comrade MacDonald abuses the privilege.

Revolutions are always verbose.

There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances.

Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man.

The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves.

The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls ‘inspiration.’

Root out the counter revolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps… Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service.

With all due respect to all philistines, the dictatorship of the proletariat does just consist in “giving a hiding” to the classes that were previously supreme, before forcing them to recognize the new order and to submit to it.

I feel here that this time they have succeeded.

Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.

England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases.

In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.