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.

The less you speak, the more you will hear.

I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write.

If you live in a graveyard, you can't weep for everyone.

Human beings are better and lazier than their rules and instructions.

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".

If... if... We didn't love freedom enough. And even more - we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! ........... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.