What is the most precious thing in the world? I see now that it is the knowledge that you have no part in injustice. Injustice is stronger than you, it always was and always will be, but let it not be done through you.

The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. "One word of truth outweighs the world.

For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Only a magician can fix a head on a body, but any fool can lop it off.

I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.

I have always insisted on the need for local self-government for Russia, but I never opposed this model to Western democracy. On the contrary, I have tried to convince my fellow citizens by citing the examples of highly effective local self-government systems in Switzerland and New England, both of which I saw first-hand.

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