... scientists have made no clear effort to become an important, independently active force of mankind. Whole congresses at a time, they back away from the suffering of others; it is more comfortable to stay within the bounds of science.

As for Europe, its claims towards Russia are fairly transparently based on fears about energy, unjustified fears at that.

Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.

The intellectual is not defined by professional group and type of occupation. Nor are good upbringing and a good family enough in themselves to produce an intellectual. An intellectual is a person whose interest in and preoccupation with the spiritual side of life are insistent and constant and not forced by external circumstances, even flying in the face of them. An intellectual is a person whose thought is nonimitative.

The name of 'reform' simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.

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.

The central government possesses no plan of finding the way out of this blind alley.