George Bernard Shaw

I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

This comes of James teaching me to think for myself, and never to hold back out of fear of what other people may think of me. It works beautifully as long as I think the same things as he does.

My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

Syllables govern the world.

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.

Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!

At the time of the First World War there was a fringe of dissidents, Bertrand Russell for example, who were in jail; Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknicht, in jail; Eugene Debs, in jail. That’s the standard picture throughout history. We find it right now.

Once wide coercive powers are given to government agencies…such powers cannot be effectively controlled.

The leaders come and go, but the people remain. Only the people are immortal.

Organization and education, when they interact with each other, they strengthen each other, they are mutually supportive.

KGB, collapsed. Of course it was incredibly difficult to go through this. After all, most of my life had been devoted to work in the agencies. But I had made my choice.

The CIA is mainly a branch of the executive to carry out secret and usually illegal activities that the executive branch wants. It wants them to be kept secret because it knows that the public won’t accept them. So it’s highly undemocratic even domestically.

There used to be the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. There used to be Soviet troops in the GDR. And we must honestly admit that they were occupation troops, which remained in Germany after WWII under the guise of allied troops. Now these occupation troops are gone, the Soviet Union has collapsed, and the Warsaw Pact is no more. There is no Soviet threat, but NATO and U.S. troops are still in Europe. What for?

Scholars per se do not have deeper political insights than other persons and are not morally superior to others. But they are obligated to help politicians seek and find the truth.

Have you read the things that were published in Moskovskiye Novosti and Ogonyok in those days? For instance, General Kalugin’s exposures? Kalugin is a traitor. I saw Kalugin during my time in Leningrad when he was deputy head of the Directorate. He was an absolute loafer. A loafer, perhaps, but he remembers you. He doesn’t remember anything. He does remember, and he says that from the point of view of the intelligence service, you worked in a province and had nothing to show for your performance. Oh, he doesn’t remember a thing. He couldn’t remember me. I had no contact with him, nor did I meet him. It is I who remembers him, because he was a big boss and everybody knew him. As to whether he knew me, there were hundreds of us.

I think God has some mechanism that he uses to punish those that make mistakes.

If you don’t like what someone has to say, argue with them.

The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks…. And therefore I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul.

Reparations – not just aid – should be provided by those responsible for devastating Iraqi civilian society by cruel sanctions and military actions, and – together with other criminal states – for supporting Saddam Hussein through his worst atrocities and beyond. That is the minimum that honesty requires.

Our Red Army now needs IL-2 aircraft like the air it breathes, like the bread it eats.