I am really two people. I am a private person and a political person. Of course, if there is a conflict, the political person comes first.

It cannot be so very surprising that I adopted a Communist viewpoint in the 1930s; so many of my contemporaries made the same choice. But many of those who made that choice in those days changed sides when some of the worst features of Stalinism became apparent. I stayed the course.

I just do my job and go home. There's just one or two people I can say are friends that I can call.

Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.

I experience for the American officers and soldiers that friendship which arises from having shared with them for a length of time dangers, sufferings, and both good and evil fortune.

If anything, we older people yearn for a peaceful world even more than young people do. We are the ones who lost friends or relatives in some war. We are the ones who have lived a lifetime of seeing and reading about human suffering.