“[I]f you live in a graveyard, you can't weep for everyone.”

“Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.”

'Lenin...analyzed why the Paris Commune was defeated... His...conclusion was that the Commune had not shot...enough of its enemies. It had destroyed too few people, at a time when it was necessary to kill entire classes and groups. And when he came to power, Lenin did just this.'

'There is but one choice: to rise to the task of the age.”

“Power is a poison well known for thousands of years.”

“To the human being who has faith in some force that holds dominion over all of us & who is therefore conscious of his own limitations, power is not necessarily fatal. For those, however, who are unaware of any higher sphere, it is a deadly poison. For them there is no antidote.”

“One word of truth outweighs the world.”

“But there is something they did not expect: that in a land where churches have been leveled, where a triumphant atheism has rampaged uncontrolled...they could not suppose that beneath this Communist steamroller the Christian tradition would survive in Russia.”

“It is true that millions of our [Soviet] countrymen have been corrupted and spiritually devastated by an officially imposed atheism, yet there remain many millions of believers: it is only external pressures that keep them from speaking out...”

“Every wag of the tongue can be overheard by someone, every facial expression observed by someone. Therefore, every word, if it does not have to be a direct lie, is nonetheless obliged not to contradict the general, common, lie.”

“In the most scientific of texts it is required that someone’s false authority or false priority be upheld somewhere, and that someone be cursed for telling the truth; without this lie even an academic work cannot see the light of day.”

“[S]uppression of information leads to entropy and total destruction.”

“In a situation of fear and betrayal over many years people survive unharmed only in a superficial, bodily sense. And inside...they become corrupt.”

“In a corrupt society ingratitude was an everyday, run-of-the-mill emotion...”

“Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions?'

“In the most scientific of texts it is required…that someone be cursed for telling the truth.”

“There exists a collection of ready-made phrases, of labels, a selection of ready-made lies. And not one single speech nor one single essay or article nor one single book...can exist without the use of these primary cliches.”

“There is no [Soviet] man who has typed even one page . . . without lying. There is no [Soviet] man who has spoken from a rostrum . . . without lying. There is no [Soviet] man who has spoken into a microphone . . . without lying.”

“Today’s world has reached a stage which, if it had been described to preceding centuries, would have called forth the cry: ‘This is the Apocalypse!’”

“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but 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.”