The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one's well-being.
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.
Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.
For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
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.
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.
It is the artist who realizes that there is a supreme force above him and works gladly away as a small apprentice under God's heaven.
The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.
The name of 'reform' simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.
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.
When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.
Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.
The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.
Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.
It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.
I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever.
