The next stage of development, perhaps in the distant future, will be a social order under which there will be no need for the coercive power of the state.

Don't forget that we lawyers, we're a higher breed of intellect, and so it's our privilege to lie. It's as clear as day. Animals can't even imagine lying: if you were to find yourself among some wild islanders, they too would only speak the truth until they learned about European culture.

Revolution is everywhere, in everything. There is no final revolution, no final number.

The highly complex, almost mathematical, nature of music creates for it an ironclad protection against the microbes of dilletantism, which penetrate much more easily into the fields of painting, literature, and the theater.

The nights were long, like the braids of a pretty girl, and the days were short, like a girl's sense. ("The North")

Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.

None of us older writers had gone through such a school. We are all self-taught. And, of course, there is always, in such a school, the danger of goose-stepping, uniformed ranks. But the Serapion Brethren have already, it seems to me, outgrown this danger. Each of them has his own individuality and his own handwriting. The common thing they have derived from the studio is the art of writing with ninety-proof ink, the art of eliminating everything that is superfluous, which is, perhaps, more difficult than writing.