Genuine politics -- even politics worthy of the name -- the only politics I am willing to devote myself to -- is simply a matter of serving those aro….

This is a confusing and uncertain period, when a thousand wise words can go completely unnoticed, and one thoughtless word can provoke an utterly non….

We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought..

You do not become a ''dissident'' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense ….

The kind of hope that I often think about…I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we d….

A state that denies its citizens their basic rights becomes a danger to its neighbors as well: internal arbitrary rule will be reflected in arbitrary….

Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the futu….

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less..

If by believing you mean praying to an anthropomorphic deity who created the world and half controls it and half observes it, then I am probably not ….

If every day a man takes orders in silence from an incompetent superior, if every day he solemnly performs ritual acts which he privately finds ridic….

It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs..

Human rights are universal and indivisible. Human freedom is also indivisible: if it is denied to anyone in the world, it is therefore denied, indire….

Follow the man who seeks the truth; run from the man who has found it..

Without commonly shared and widely entrenched moral values and obligations, neither the law, nor democratic government, nor even the market economy w….

When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete..

Nothing is more powerful than individuals acting out of their own conscience..

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side..

I am not an optimist, because I am not sure that everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist, because I am not sure that everything ends badly. I just….

I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to plac….

Courage means going against majority opinion in the name of the truth..

Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed..