You're sincere, but in order not to upset your views you avoid talking with people who think differently. You pick your thoughts from conversations with people like yourself, from books written by people like yourself. In physics they call it resonance. You start out with modest opinions, but they match and build each other up to a scale.

If one is a professional soldier, it is part of one's job to die sooner or later.

We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others... When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers ... we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

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

One drop of truth can outweigh an ocean of lies

You took my freedom away a long time ago and you can't give it back because you haven't got it yourself.

When the whole discussion of "developing a national idea" hastily began in post-Soviet Russia, I tried to pour cold water on it with the objection that, after all the devastating losses we had experienced, it would be quite sufficient to have just one task: the preservation of a dying people.