The sea was not freedom; it was a likeness of freedom, a symbol of freedom...How splendid freedom must be if a mere likeness of it, a mere reminder of it, is enough to fill a man with happiness.

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.

At war a Russian man puts on a white shirt. He may live in sin, but he dies like a saint.

The longer a nation's history, the more wars, invasions, wanderings, and periods of captivity it has seen-the greater the diversity of its faces.

I don't want you to be young and beautiful. I only want one thing. I want you to be kind-hearted - and not just towards cats and dogs.

There's nothing more difficult than saying goodbye to a house where you've suffered.

I have written only what I have thought through, felt through and suffered through.

He was endowed with the extraordinary powers of endurance characteristic of madmen and simpletons.

Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die - anything to stop remembering.

There are people whose souls have just withered, people who are willing to go along with anything evil - anything so as not to be suspected of disagreeing with whoever is in power.

I don't believe in your "Good". I believe in human kindness.

God, listen to the absurdity within us and raise us from the illusion!

It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis, ' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.

...Gentlemen don't understand anything, however wise they may be.

He'd lived so long in anticipation of his own death that to contemplate his future was like standing at the edge of a cliff, staring into a vertiginous rush of open sky.

When every one of your arguments is characterized an attempt to bring back slavery or resegregate lunch counters, it's a little hard to have any sort of productive debate.

It's about time that people forget that image of strip clubs as seedy places...Rather, today's clubs are capital-intensive female-empowerment zones.

I just want to work hard. I love that feeling.

But the validity of a doctrine does not depend on whose ox it gores.

Your current conditions do not reflect your ultimate potential, but rather the size and quality of goals upon which you currently are focusing.