The United States has overstepped its borders in all spheres - economic, political and humanitarian - and has imposed itself on other states.

At least in Russia, you cannot just go and tap into someone's phone conversation without a warrant issued by court. That's more or less the way a civilized society should go about fighting terrorism.

China is a great country with a great culture, populated by fascinating, industrious and talented people.

Our military might is the guarantor of Russia's security and independence.

We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.

A figure who receives money from abroad for his political work, and thus serves some foreign interest, cannot be a politician in Russia.

It is wrong to make anyone into an enemy; it is wrong to scare the people of one's own country with that enemy and try to rally some allies on that basis.

Russia is a part of European culture. Therefore, it is with difficulty that I imagine NATO as an enemy.

Our aims are absolutely clear: They are a high living standard in the country and a secure, free and comfortable life.

I'm eternally grateful to fate and the citizens of Russia that they've trusted me to be the head of the Russian government.

We live for books.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...

To survive, you must tell stories.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.

Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.

Then why do you want to know?" "Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.

Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

Love is wiser than wisdom.

What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?

Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.

As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.

Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.

When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance.

Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.

We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.

Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.”" -

We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.

Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed.

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.

True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.

It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.

Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.

Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.

The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.

Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.

When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.

I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.

I felt like poisoning a monk.

How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.

The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.