Idleness leads to relaxation, sooner or later bringing about ideological and material corruption, accompanied by lack of discipline, anarchy chaos and defeat.

The rich man's dog gets more in the way of vaccination, medicine and medical care than do the workers upon whom the rich man's wealth is built.

Solidarity is not an act of charity, but mutual aid between forces fighting for the same objective.

The state must be the first to be organized and totally committed to serving the interests of the people.

Personalities and fame pass; the revolution must remain.

Salaries and wages must reflect the reality of the enterprise's economic performance; deviations from the planned performance should be reflected in pay.

Unity and victory are synonymous.

It is essential to link enterprises on the basis of objective laws of a socialist economy and legal system.

There are more than 200,000 people in Maputo who are nothing more than parasites.

The state, the state apparatus, is not an abstraction.

Love with passion. Love for no reason.

The decisions that take you to your highest points in life are the toughest decisions you'd have to make.

Shunning evil is wisdom

One grateful thought is a ray of sunshine.  A hundred such thoughts paint a sunrise.  A thousand will rival the glaring sky at noonday - for gratitude is light against the darkness.

Holding my hands, kissing the palms, his smile is ecstatic, jubilant, adoring, and the song playing speaks for him, “Have you ever seen the light...the way it shines in you.

I sincerely want to meet the girl that was meant for me, but I want to sleep with the girls that weren't.

I am learning to live, and to see beauty in everything.

I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas.

My tears speak for me.

Arnošt Lustig is one of the leading contemporary Czech fiction writers, and certainly the most important Jewish writer of Bohemia to have survived the Holocaust.