The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.
Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.
The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one’s fingers.
Show us not the aim without the way. For ends and means on earth are so entangled That changing one, you change the other too; Each different path brings other ends in view
History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations
I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned.
The hangman is a disgrace to any civilized country.
Honor is decency without vanity.
The fact is: I no longer believe in my own infallibility. That is why I am lost.
The 'gallows' are not only a symbol of death, but also a symbol of cruelty, terror and irreverence for life; the common denominator of primitive savagery, medieval fanaticism and modern totalitarianism.
History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unnering flows towards her goal. History knows herway. She makes no mistakes.
[My father] loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance, and later on took a naive pride in seeing my name in print.
Some of the greatest discoveries...consist mainly in the clearing away of psychological roadblocks which obstruct the approach to reality; which is why,post factum they appear so obvious.
And there was only one revolutionary virtue which he had not learned, the virtue of self-deception
But who will be proved right? It will only be known later. Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history's absolution.
Nothing is worse in prison than the consciousness of one's innocenc; it prevents acclimatizatin and undermines one's morale...
Aberrations of the human mind are to a large extent due to the obsessional pursuit of some part-truth, treated as if it were a whole truth.
Perhaps he did not know himself - like all these intellectual cynics...
There was a dense fog in my brain,impenetrable to any coherent thought,except the dull obsession of counting the minutes - an aching state of semi concsiousness and numb idiocy.
Hitherto man had to live with the idea of death as an individual; from now onward mankind will have to live with the idea of its death as a species.
Revolutionary theory had frozen to a dogmatic cult, with a simplified, easily graspable catechism, and with No. 1 as the high priest celebrating the Mass.
Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
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.
The addiction to the Soviet myth is as tenacious and difficult to cure as any other addiction.
