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.
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.
For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
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.
Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.
The name of 'reform' simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.
It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
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.
Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.
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.
The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.
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.
Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.
Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.
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.
For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
