A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
European democracy was originally imbued with a sense of Christian responsibility and self-discipline, but these spiritual principles have been gradually losing their force. Spiritual independence is being pressured on all sides by the dictatorship of self-satisfied vulgarity, of the latest fads, and of group interests.
I am not a critic of the West: I am a critic of the weakness of the West.
If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person's mind begins to roam irretrievably. One's fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
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 human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, exemplified by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.
The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.
The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each political party, and of course in the United Nations.
Truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.
Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.
When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists' civil rights.
You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power -- he's free again.