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- "Socialist realism" is much more than a matter of taste, of preference of one style of painting or music rather than another. It is concerned with the beliefs which lie at the foundation of human existence.
- "In the field of literature it FORBIDs what has in every age been the writer's essential task-to look at the world from his own INDEPENDENT viewpoint, to tell the truth as he sees it, and so to keep watch and ward in the interest of society as a whole."
- "this book is at the same time a battlefield."
- "It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy."
- intellectuals become useful, the bourgeois business-class is ostracized
- art is censored
- "It is no wonder that a writer or a painter doubts the wisdom of resistance."
- "If he were sure that art opposed to the official line could have a lasting value, he probably would not hesitate."(14)
- "The work of really fine Western scholars and artists escapes notice."(16)
- "Perhaps independent states are over."(18)
- "Are Americans really stupid? It is despair mixed with the residue of hope." (25)
- "Man tends to regard the order he lives as natural. The clothes he wears are exactly what they should be and he laughs at the idea that he might be equally well in a Roman toga or medieval armor."
- "Now he knows he must avoid the dark body lying in the gutter, and refrain from asking any unnecessary questions."(27)
- "But the father of a family must go out in order to provide bread and soup for his wife and children; and every night they worry about whether or not he will return."(28)
- "The nearness of death destroys shame. They copulate in public, on the small bit of ground surrounded by barbed wire-their last home on earth. Boys and girls in their teens, about to go off to baricades to fight tanks with pistols and bottles of gasoline, want to enjoy their youth and lose their respect for standards of decency."(28)
- different perceptions: West is technologically advanced and materially wealthy, some Western intellectuals are Communists, Russia is technologically backward and the people are materially poor.
