[My father] loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance, and later on took a naive pride in seeing my name in print.
The distance between the library and the bedroom is astronomical
The pressure of the environment cramps art as it cramps behaviour. One may challenge this environment, but one has to pay for it, and the price is neurotic guilt. There never was an intelligentsia wit...
The deterioration of the intelligentsia is as much a symptom of disease as the corruption of the ruling class or the sleeping sickness of the proletariat.
Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.
On the historical scale, the damages wrought by individual violence for selfish motives are insignificant compared to the holocausts resulting from self-transcending devotion to collectively shared be...
The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.
It was quiet in the cell. Rubashov heard only the creaking of his steps on the tiles. Six and a half steps to the door, whence they must come to fetch him, six and a half steps to the window, behind w...
The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights...
The old disease, thought Rubashov. Revolutionaries should not think through other people's minds. Or, perhaps they should? Or even ought to? How can one change the world if one identifies oneself with...
Much depends on asking the right question at the right time.
Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.
What had he said to them? I bow my knees before the country, before the masses, before the whole people.... And what then? What happened to these masses, to this people? For forty years it had been dr...
The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.
These waves, then, on which I sit, coming out of nothing, travelling through a non-medium in multi-dimensional non-space, are the ultimate answer modern physics has to offer to man's question after th...
History has taught us that often lies serve her better than the truth; for man is sluggish and has to be led through the desert for forty years before each step in his development. And he has to be dr...
The problem of the planetary orbits had been hopelessly bogged down in its purely geometrical frame of reference, and when Kepler realized that he could not get it unstuck, he tore it out of that fram...
With you, thought Rubashov and looked at the whitewashed wall behind which the other stood—in the meantime he hadprobably lit a cigarette and was blowing the smoke against the wall — with you I have n...
Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.