When you're young, you haven't the experience, when you're old you haven't the strength.

If a person can build a fence around himself, he is bound to do it.

[He] understood the people in a new way...The people is not everyone who speaks our language, nor yet the elect marked by the fiery stamp of genius. Not by birth, not by the work of one's hands, not by the wings of education is one elected into the people. But by one's inner self. Everyone forges his inner self year after year. One must try to temper, to cut, to polish one's soul so as to become a human being. And thereby become a tiny particle of one's own people.

Any fool can bomb a train, but just try sorting out the mess.

Each person has his special moment of life when he unfolded himself to the fullest, felt to the deepest, and expressed himself to the utmost, to himself and to others.

Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art-and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, oversimplified explanations.

In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.