Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.

• It lies in human nature that where you experience your first laughs, you also remember the age kindly.
• The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
• If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.
• What's certain is that a totalitarian enclave like Cuba's can't continue to exist, so change will definitely come there, eventually.
• The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.
• It lies in human nature that where you experience your first laughs, you also remember the age kindly.
• When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.
• Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.
• I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.
• Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.