... people don't know what they are striving for. They waste themselves in senseless thrashing around for the sake of a handful of goods and die without realizing their spiritual wealth.

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers . . . we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

A whole week, a single campaign, a month, a week, even a day was far more than enough to cut a company or platoon to ribbons or cripple a man for life: it needed only a quarter of an hour.

We will die, but art will remain.

Was it Gorky who had said, "If your children are no better than you are, you have fathered them in vain, indeed you have lived in vain".

... but food eaten quickly isn't food.

One should not ascribe the evil deeds of individual leaders or political regimes to an innate fault of the Russian people and their country.