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?
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.
The history of a revolution is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny.
Fascism is a caricature of Jacobinism.
The fundamental flaw of vulgar thought lies in the fact that it wishes to content itself with motionless imprints of a reality which consists of eternal motion.
The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls ‘inspiration.’
The task of the proletariat is to create a still more powerful fatherland with a far greater power of resistance, the Republican United States of Europe, as the foundation of the United States of the World.
In inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a dictator substitutes himself for the central committee.
I feel here that this time they have succeeded.
You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you.
England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases.
Revolutions are always verbose.
One of the most surprising things in life is the sudden realization that one has become old.
The usages and methods of warfare are thus determined by changing circumstances and, therefore, they themselves can in nowise be eternal.
When one runs with the wolves, one must howl with the pack.
Where force is necessary, there it must be applied boldly, decisively and completely. But one must know the limitations of force; one must know when to blend force with a maneuver, a blow with an agreement.
Against my protests a mausoleum was built on the Red Square, a monument unbecoming and offensive to the revolutionary consciousness.