“Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.”
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The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever.
For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.
