“First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.”

Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.

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

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.

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

There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.

Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.

The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.

The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.

Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one’s well-being.

The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.

The clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble.

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

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

You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power – he’s free again.

The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today.

There is no act of treachery or meanness of which a political party is not capable; for in politics there is no honour.

Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.

Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.

Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy.

For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.

It was my fortune, or misfortune, to be called to the office of Chief Executive without any previous political training.

It matters little, at this point, where the exact truth lies in the maze of perjury, evasion, and of contempt for the normal – hardly inspiring – standards of political conduct.