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"Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate ... the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible."
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"Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure."

"Every time I watch a person awaken to their inner strength, I see what we're made of, and we're magnificent. We're brilliant. We really are. We crave magic because we are magic. We crave power because we are pure power."

"The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination."
Explore more quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky

"The worst of such stories is that the triumphant romancers can always be put to confusion and crushed by the very details in which real life is so rich and which these unhappy and involuntary story-tellers neglect as insignificant trifles. Oh, they have no thought to spare for such details, their minds are concentrated on their grand invention as a whole, and fancy any one daring to pull them up for a trifle! But that's how they are caught."

"And, beginning to grind his teeth again, Pyotr Petrovich admitted that he'd been a fool--but only to himself, of course."

"You needn't be afraid of life! Life is so good when you do something that is good and just."

"His mind is in bondage. He is haunted by a great, usolved doubt. He is one of those who doesn't want millions, but an answer to their questions."

"There's something here, my dear boy, that you don't understand yet. A man will fall in love with some beauty, with a woman's body, or even a part of a woman's body (a sensualist can understand that) and he'll abandon his own children for her, sell his father and mother, and his country, Russia, too. If he's honest, he'll steal; if he's humane, he'll murder; if he's faithful, he'll deceive."

"The criminal who revolted against society hates it, and considers himself in the right; society was wrong, not he. Has he not, moreover, undergone his punishment? Accordingly he is absolved, acquitted in his own eyes. In spite of different opinions, everyone will acknowledge that there are acts which everywhere and always, under no matter what legal system, are beyond doubt criminal, and should be regarded as long as man is man."

"Indeed, in that sense we're all rather often almost like mad people, only with the slight difference that the 'sick' are somewhat madder than we are, so that it's necessary to draw a line here."
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