The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.

The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.

You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power - he's free again.

Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.

For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.

You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power - he's free again.

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.