“In the contradiction lies the hope.”

Though the rich of this earth find no difficulty in creating misery, they can’t bear to see it.

Great sport begins at a point where it has ceased to be healthy.

Who has good luck is good, Who has bad luck is bad.

I opened the man’s skull and messed about with his brains. I saw how they patched fellows up, so as to cart them back to the Front as quickly as they could.

Spring is noticed, if at all By people sitting in railway trains.

Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.

The shrill voices of those who give orders Are full of fear like the squeakings of Piglets awaiting the butcher’s knife, as their fat arses Sweat with anxiety in their office chairs…. Fear rules not only those who are ruled, but The rulers too.

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.

Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.

Firebugs dragging their gasoline bottles are approaching the Academy of Arts, with a grin. And so, instead of embracing them, let us demand the freedom of the elbow to knock the bottles out of their filthy hands.

If you join the rat race — you’re in the race of rats.

We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it’s all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It’s the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.

Who struggles can fail. Who doesn’t struggle has already failed!

Even the most blockheaded bureaucrat, provided he loves peace, is a greater lover of the arts than any so-called art-lover who loves the arts of war.

Temptation to behave is terrible.

Here today we huddle tight As the darkest heathens might The snow falls chilly on our skin The snow is forcing its way in. Hush, snow, come in with us to dwell: We were thrown out by Heaven as well.

I don’t know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that Barack Obama was sincere. It didn’t feel like a line to me.

A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory.

The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.

Those laws, being forged for universal application, are in perpetual conflict with personal interest, just as personal interest is always in contradiction with the general interest.

The theory of the permanent revolution, in contradiction to the theory of socialism in one country, was recognized by the entire Bolshevik party during the period from 1917 to 1923.

I’m a walking contradiction.

The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it.

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind – and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.