“An honest man is all right even if he’s an idiot…but a crook must have brains.”

When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid.

Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.

Remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the future.

Politics is something similar to the lower physiological functions, with the unpleasant difference that political functions are unavoidably carried out in public.

The revolution has overthrown the monarchy, true! But perhaps this means that the revolution simply has driven the skin disease inside the organism.

When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.

Truth doesn’t always heal a wounded soul.

A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains.

Let us not search for the guilty ones only among others, let us speak the bitter truth: we are all guilty each and every one of us.

In the carriages of the past, you can’t go anywhere.

Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man.

Everywhere, within man and without, there is devastation, instability, chaos, and evidence of some prolonged rout.

Processing the human raw material is naturally more complicated than processing lumber.

In war it is necessary to kill as many people as possible — such is the cynical logic of war. Brutality in a fight is unavoidable; have you seen how cruelly children fight in the streets?

In the maxim of the past you cannot go anywhere.

Be good, be kind, be humane, and charitable; love your fellows; console the afflicted; pardon those who have done you wrong.