It is a brave man who is the first to sit down during a standing ovation.
Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide process, with East and West yielding the same results, and once again for the same reason: Men have forgotten God.
Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.
You should rejoice that you’re in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul.
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.
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.
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, not between classes, nor between political parties, but through every human heart.
There is no point asserting and reasserting what the heart cannot believe.
Work was like a stick. It had two ends. When you worked for the knowing you gave them quality; when you worked for a fool you simply gave him eyewash.
We didn’t love freedom enough.
Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.
But nothing is all black in nature.
Mourn if you must, but don’t stop fighting.
In military science there is a principle more important than “Forward”: it is that the task should be proportionate to the means.
If you wanted to put the world to rights, who should you begin with: yourself or others?
The revolution is an amalgam of former Party functionaries, quasi- democrats, KGB officers, and black-market wheeler-dealers, who are standing in power now and have represented a dirty hybrid unseen in world history.
Surely people should eventually cease to be surprised at anything? And yet they continue to be.
If state, party and social policy will not be based on morality, then mankind has no future to speak of.
Let all of us who shared the prison soup meet again in better times!
Good or evil-you cannot build your life apart from this distinction.