True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.

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Explosions are not comfortable.

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The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.

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If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.

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Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.

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There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.

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You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.

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Crossing out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It requires the sharpest eye to decide what is superfluous and must be removed. And it requires ruthlessness toward yourself -- the greatest ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. You must know how to sacrifice parts in the name of the whole.

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There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times.

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It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.

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