The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

The purposiveness of all vital processes, the strategy of the genes and the power of the exploratory drive in animal and man, all seem to indicate that the pull of the future is as real as the pressure of the past.

History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations

One question that people always ask at home is never asked here: "What happened to Communism in Russia?" Everybody yawns when a visitor brings it up, because the answer is so obvious to every Russian. The answer is that there never was Communism in Russia; there were only communists.

Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness. Both are funny, but only in retrospect.

I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned.

In any language it is a struggle to make a sentence say exactly what you mean.