If there were no executioners, there would be no executions.

Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.

The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us...than the need for any external expansion of our power.

In every life there is one particular event that is decisive for the entire person-for his fate, his convictions, his passions.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.

We are all human, and our senses are quicker to prompt us than our reason. Every man gives off a scent, and that scent tells you how to act before your head does.