““...the rightist totalitarian program was exceptionally poor. The only gratification it offered came from collective warmth: crowds, red faces, mouths open in a shout, marches, arms brandishing sticks; but little rational satisfaction. Neither racist doctrines, not hatred of foreigners, not the glorification of one’s own national traditions could efface the feeling that the entire program was improvised to deal with the problems of the moment.”
— Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, page 8
“The man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgements and thinking habits are. Their resultant lack of imagination is appalling. Because they were born and raised in a given social order and in a given system of values, they believe that any others order must be ‘unnatural,’ and that it cannot last because it is incompatible with human nature. ”
— Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, page 29
“Wherever there is a crisis, the ruling classes take refuge in fascism as a safeguard against the revolution of the proletariat.”
— Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, page 30
“Whoever would take the measure of intellectual life in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe from the monotonous articles appearing in the press or the stereotyped speeches pronounced there, would be making a grave error. Just as theologians in periods of strict orthodoxy expressed their views in the rigorous language of the Church, so the writers of the people’s democracies make use of an accepted special style, terminology, and linguistic ritual. What is important is not what someone said but what he wanted to say...”
— Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, page 78-79
“The reader of today is in search of hope, and he does not care for poetry that accepts the order of things as permanent.”
“We want to be the masters of the future only for the power to change the past. ”
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, pg. 30
“To see the devil as a partisan of Evil and an angel as a warrior on the side of Good is to accept the demagogy of angels. ”
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, pg. 35-36
“For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an undifferentiated universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words. ”
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, page 147
“All of us are prisoners to a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages its guerilla war, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise. ”
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, page 268
“The best progressive ideas are those that include a strong enough dose of provocation to make its supporters feel proud of being original, but at the same time attract so many adherents that the risk of being an isolated exception is immediately averted by the noisy approval of a triumphant crowd. ”
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, page 273
“It takes so little, a tiny puff of air, for things to shift imperceptibly, and whatever it was that a man was ready to lay down his life for a few seconds earlier seems suddenly to be sheer nonsense. ”
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, page 297
