No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.