“Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience… from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.”

We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.

Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word ‘modernity’ if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes… we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions – especially selfish ones.

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.

The next war… may well bury Western civilization forever.

The name of ‘reform’ simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.

How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand one who’s cold?

A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.

Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.

Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.

Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme.

Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you – you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.

When we want to have our own style of living, it is nobody’s business but ours. What we do in private is our private business.

One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it.

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

What broke when he could bring himself to thrust down the knife into the warm flesh, to bring down the axe on the living head, to cleave down between the seeing eyes, to shoot the gun that would drive death into the beating heart?

Her survival and thriving truth has been marred with black ties of words, intentions, behavior and presence.

I did all kinds of things in order to earn a living.