No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.

When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps.

You took my freedom away a long time ago and you can't give it back because you haven't got it yourself.

It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.

We never know beforehand how new posts or new work will change us.

Gorbachev's administration was amazingly politically naïve, inexperienced and irresponsible towards the country. It was not governance but a thoughtless renunciation of power. The admiration of the West in return only strengthened his conviction that his approach was right. But let us be clear that it was Mikhail Gorbachev, and not Boris Yeltsin, as is now widely being claimed, who first gave freedom of speech and movement to the citizens of Russia.