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Quotes by Russian Authors
"Unless the theatre can ennoble you, make you a better person, you should flee from it."
"The czar was always sending us commands - you shall not do this and you shall not do that - till there was very little left that we might do, except pay tribute and die."
"I want my word to be up to the scale of the feat of arms performed by the Russian soldier."
"Then I was lucky I met with my future husband, and I started new life with my husband, and I was happy again. He was a musician. I start to travel with him through Europe also and around the former Soviet Union."
"And we, from the whole of our life experience there, have concluded that there is only one way to withstand violence: with firmness."
"I am convinced that the modular structure of the Mir will be the main trend in manned orbital stations development in the next century."
"You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you."
"Instead of following one another the sounds overlap; a sound which is acoustically perceived as coming after another one can be articulated simultaneously with the latter or even in part before it."
"Suspicion is one of the morbid reactions by which an organism defends itself and seeks another equilibrium."
"On a royal birthday every house must fly a flag, or the owner would be dragged to a police station and be fined twenty-five rubles."
"England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases."
"Of course, peace treaties are very attractive to those who sign them. They strengthen one's prestige with the electorate. But the time will come when the names of these public figures will be erased from history. Nobody will remember them any longer. But the Western peoples will have to pay heavily for these overtrusting agreements."
"At the present time it is widely accepted among lawyers that law is higher than morality-law is something which is shaped and developed, whereas morality is something inchoate and amorphous. This is not the case. The opposite is true: morality is higher than law! Law is our human attempt to embody in rules a part of that moral sphere which is above us. We try to understand this morality, bring it down to earth, and present it in the form of law. Sometimes we are more successful, sometimes less. Sometimes we have a mere caricature of morality, but morality is always higher than law. This view must never be abandoned."
"Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction."
"While you are experimenting, do not remain content with the surface of things."
"The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness."
"The formula 'Two and two make five' is not without its attractions."
"Nowadays young people have great choice of occupations, hobbies, etc, so chess is experiencing difficulties because of the high competition. Now it's hard to make living in chess, so our profession does attract young people."
"We must force the government to stop the bird migration. We must shoot all birds, field all our men and troops... and force migratory birds to stay where they are."
"The past,' he thought, 'is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.' And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered."
"No, justice has not ceased to exist. How could it? It is possible for men to abandon their sight of it, and then it is justice that destroys them. But it is not possible for justice to go out of existence, because one is an attribute of the other, because justice is the act of acknowledging that which exists."
"To love someone means to see him as God intended him."
"Our experiments not only proved the existence of a nervous apparatus in the above-mentioned glands, but also disclosed some facts clearly showing the participation of these nerves in normal activity."
"The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others."
"Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary."
"Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil."
"Pierre had for the first time experienced that strange and fascinating feeling in the Slobodsky palace, when he suddenly felt that wealth and power and life, all that men build up and guard with such effort ,is only worth anything through the joy with which it can all be cast away."
"Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach."
"The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds."
"The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul."
"We're always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is. Sometimes, you know, I can't help feeling that that's what it is."
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