The time's come: there's a terrific thunder-cloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up....It's going to blow away all this idleness and indifference, and prejudice against work....I'm going to work, and in twenty-five or thirty years' time every man and woman will be working.

If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.

To dine, drink champagne, raise a racket and make speeches about the people's consciousness, the people's conscience, freedom andso forth while servants in tails are scurrying around your table, just like serfs, and out in the severe cold on the street await coachmen--this is the same as lying to the holy spirit.

One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.

Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.

Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.

I kept thinking how marvellous it would be if I could somehow tear my heart, which felt so heavy, out of my chest.