Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day.

Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted"—"not permitted"—"this you can and that you can't." Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read. -Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers

What a force is laughter.

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

Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?

... the inexorable lesson of centuries: suffering must be borne; there is no way out.

I dare hope that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history.