Our salvation is in striving to achieve what we know we'll never achieve.

People were really interested in what was going on because of the international context of the Cold War.

Readership was high, and very attentive. It was people's only source of knowledge about the world.

The Cold War in Africa is one of the darkest, most disgraceful pages in contemporary history, and everybody ought to be ashamed.

The Cold War was waged in a particularly brutal and cynical way in Africa, and Africa seemed powerless to do anything to stop it.

The extent of one man's guilt may be defined by how much of it is experienced by the party he injured.

The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.

My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection.

The official independence celebration was going to be held over four or five days, and a group of journalists from all over the world was allowed to fly in, because Angola was closed otherwise.

We have such a mixture now, such a fusion of different genres.

Money changes all the iron rules into rubber bands.

In the Russian experience, although the Russian state is oppressive, it is their state, it is part of their fabric, and so the relation between Russian citizens and their state is complicated.

In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.

In order to feel contempt, you generally need to cherish some kind of feelings.

There is a fundamental difference between the Polish experience of the state and the Russian experience. In the Polish experience, the state was always a foreign power. So, to hate the state was a patriotic act.