The less you speak, the more you will hear.

If we don't know our own history, then we simply will have to endure all of the same mistakes, all of the same sacrifices, all of the same absurdities over again - times ten.

It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

Work was like a stick. It had two ends. When you worked for the knowing you gave them quality; when you worked for a fool you simply gave him eyewash.

Gorbachev's administration was amazingly politically naïve, inexperienced and irresponsible towards the country. It was not governance but a thoughtless renunciation of power. The admiration of the West in return only strengthened his conviction that his approach was right. But let us be clear that it was Mikhail Gorbachev, and not Boris Yeltsin, as is now widely being claimed, who first gave freedom of speech and movement to the citizens of Russia.

... once you get up steam, you are carried helplessly along.

Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for-all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him.