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.

A man used to riding in a car cannot understand a pedestrian.

Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.

And the over-all fact that you are a frail vessel full of errors.

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

Even the most broad-minded of us can embrace only that part of truth into which our own snout has blundered.

Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for-all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him.