In Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.

You can be an extreme materialist, thinking that economic development ultimately determines everything; then you are truly ideological.

Those who were still able to write beautiful melodies were kitsch composers like Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky approaches true art not in his numerous beautiful melodies, but when a melodic line is thwarted.

Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.

The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.

This, then, is the truth of the discourse of universal human rights: the Wall separating those covered by the umbrella of Human Rights and those excluded from its protective cover. Any reference to universal human rights as an 'unfinished project' to be gradually extended to all people is here a vain ideological chimera - and, faced with this prospect, do we, in the West, have any right to condemn the excluded when they use any means, inclusive of terror, to fight their exclusion?

What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth.