Quotations

Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself: Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections, but instantly set about remedying them. Every day begin the task anew. How can you reprove any one with gentleness, when you correct yourself with asperity?

St Francis de Sales

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. 

Francis Bacon (the artist, not the essayist, philosopher, statesman and crook)

You haven't I suppose ever mixed with politicians at close quarters. They're awful...their stupidity is inhuman.

Lord (Robert) Skidelsky

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.

Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.

What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn