Iowans are super talkative, like me. I'm very talkative. I'm very curious about strangers.
What is terrible when you seek the truth is that you find it.
Early on, I learnt from the Russian intelligentsia that the only meaning of life lies in conscious participation in the making of history. The more I think of that, the more deeply true it seems to be. It follows that one must range oneself actively against everything that diminishes man, and involve oneself in all struggles which tend to liberate and enlarge him. This categorical imperative is by no way lessened by the fact that such an involvement is inevitably soiled by error: it is a worse error merely to live for oneself, caught within traditions which are soiled by inhumanity.
It is often said that ‘the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning’. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs, a mass of other germs, and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious socialist revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in the corpse – and which he may have carried in him since his birth – is that very sensible?
Carelessness on the part of revolutionaries has always been the best aid the police have.
He who speaks, he who writes is above all one who speaks on behalf of all those who have no voice.
I followed his argument with the blank uneasiness which one might feel in the presence of a logical lunatic.
To accuse me of making sensations is the easiest way of attacking me, and in reality leaves the question of sculpture untouched.
Having a place to live is a fundamental right and the state must establish a framework that ensures that apartments are affordable.
Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.
Many events seem to happen twice to me; even trifles, unimportant-seeming, recur, as if I were destined to live them again, time reconquered, but with added knowledge and a different outcome.