Lenin is not comparable to any revolutionary figure in history. Revolutionaries have had ideals. Lenin has none.

My brother could not write about trifles. Even in society he became animated only when some serious discussion was engaged in, and he complained of feeling 'a dull pain in the brain'--a physical pain, as he used to say--when he was with people who cared only for small talk.

I understand regicide as a means of obtaining vengeance for the ruin of our lives, but regicide as a means of obtaining political freedom I could never understand.

The future cannot be legislated. All that can be done is to anticipate its most important movements and to clear the path for them.

War is the usual condition of Europe. A thirty years' supply of causes of war is always on hand.

When one has talent, everything contributes to its development.

Have not prisons - which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe - always been universities of crime?