Quote collection
167 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If I have accomplished anything good, then it's mainly because I've been driven by the need to know whether I can accomplish things I'm not sure I have the capacity for."
"Though my heart may be left of centre, I have always known that the only economic system that works is a market economy... This is the only natural economy, the only kind that makes sense, the only one that can lead to prosperity, because it is the only one that reflects the nature of life itself."
"The only salvation of the world today... is the rapid dissemination of the basic values of the West, that is, the ideas of democracy, human rights, the civil society, and the free market."
"It's not true that you should first think up an idea for a better world and only then "put it into practice," but, rather, through the fact of your existence in the world, you create the idea or manifest it - create it, as it were, from the "material of the world," articulate it in the "language of the world.""
"True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?"
"Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations."
"None of us know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events."
"There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them. Besides, to distrust words, and indict them for the horrors that might slumber unobtrusively within them - isn’t this, after all, the true vocation of the intellectual?"
"The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and ... often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it."
"I have read somewhere that in a totalitarian system martyrdom does better than thought."
"There appear to be no integrating forces, no unified meaning, no true inner understanding of phenomena in our experience of the world. Experts can explain anything in the objective world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In short, we live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain."
"If [Western] relations with Russia are to be friendly, they must be open and sincere, otherwise there can be no friendship at all. That means one should be able to speak openly about everything at meetings and conferences. It shouldn't be that we can't discuss the killing of journalists in Russia, or the suppression of human rights, or all the warning signs surfacing in Russia because of oil and gas or other economic reasons. It's a big problem, but it's the same in Western relations with Arab states."
"If one were required to increase the dramatic seriousness of his face in relation to the seriousness of the problems he had to confront, he would quickly petrify and become his own statue."
"Whether all is really lost or not depends entirely on whether or not I am lost."
"People who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being."
"The most important thing is that man should be the measure of all structures, including economic structures, and not that man be made to measure for those structures. The most important thing is not to lose sight of personal relationships - i.e., the relationships between man and his co-workers, between subordinates and their superiors, between man and his work, between this work and its consequences."
"I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect."
"Let us admit that most of us writers feel an essential aversion to politics. By taking such a position, however, we accept the perverted principle of specialization, according to which some are paid to write about the horrors of the world and human responsibility and others to deal with those horrors and bear the human responsibility for them."
"I cannot imagine that I could strive for something if I did not carry hope in me."
"There is only one Art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. ... Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all."