The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul...

Which of us can control his feelings?

A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste

Someone that you have deprived of everything is no longer in your power. He is once again entirely free.

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.

For a country to have a great writer is to have another government.

In all probability an outburst of desperation in the midst of general submissiveness will always help.