The pillars of Hercules of the United States are vulgarity and stupidity.
Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever.
He who slanders the victim aids the executioner.
From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality.
Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain – at least in a poor country like Russia – and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.
If we had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.
Insurrection is an art, and like all arts has its own laws.
In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.
Our party’s most outstanding mediocrity.
Nowhere else did repressions, purges, suppressions, and all other kinds of bureaucratic hooliganism in general acquire such horrifying scope as in Ukraine, in the struggle against powerful forces concealed in the Ukrainian masses that desired more freedom and independence.
Where force is necessary, there it must be applied boldly, decisively and completely.
If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one’s life, without seeing oneself in the “mirror” of literature?
As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the sacredness of human life.
With all due respect to all philistines, the dictatorship of the proletariat does just consist in “giving a hiding” to the classes that were previously supreme, before forcing them to recognize the new order and to submit to it.
Let us not forget that revolutions are accomplished through people, although they be nameless. Materialism does not ignore the feeling, thinking, and acting man, but explains him.
The revenge of history is more powerful than the revenge of the most powerful General Secretary.
The United States is not only the strongest, but also the most terrified country.
City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automation, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.
Where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation.
Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures. Everything is better than some things and worse than others. Which you choose to compare your experiences and situation with determines whether you will be happy and grateful or sad and jealous.