In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.

And when the war broke out, its real horrors, its real dangers, its menace of real death were a blessing compared with the inhuman reign of the lie, and they brought relief because they broke the spell of the dead letter.

He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.

No single man makes history. History cannot be seen just as one cannot see grass growing.

You and I are like the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with - at the end of it, you and I are just as stripped and homeless. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in all the thousands of years between their time and ours, and it is in memory of all that vanished splendour that we live and love and weep and cling to one another.

To be a woman is a great adventure; To drive men mad is a heroic thing.

It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.