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Quotes by Russian Authors
"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."
"The communism of Marx seeks a strong state centralization, and where this exists, there the parasitic Jewish nation - which speculates upon the labor of people - will always find the means for its existence."
"We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the abstract and general just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer and contemplation."
"And, in nineteen seventy two Olympic Games I wasn't really going to be a star, and overnight I became a star."
"My present work concerns the problems connected with the theory of elementary particles, the theory of gravitation and cosmology and I shall be glad if I can manage to make some contribution to these important branches of science."
"No one is to blame. It is neither their fault nor ours. It is the misfortune of being born when a whole world is dying."
"Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character."
"But if we reason it out simply and not try to be one bit fancy, then what sort of pride can you possibly take or what's the sense of ever having it, if man is poorly put together as a physiological type and if the enormous majority of the human race is brutal, stupid, and profoundly unhappy?"
"A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths."
"We reform others unconsciously when we walk uprightly."
"The egotist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with them in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy. He does not exist for any other man-and he asks no other man to exist for him."
"And the existence is tedious, anyway; it is a senseless, dirty business, this life."
"Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one's well-being."
"You're never able to please everybody, especially when you're transforming a country like Russia."
"Now the identification of individual sounds by phonetic observation is an artificial way of proceeding."
"He was a sceptic, he was young, abstract, and therefore cruel."
"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."
"The memories of home and of her children rose up in her imagination with a peculiar charm quite new to her, with a sort of new brilliance. That world of her own seemed quite new to her now so sweet and precious that she would not on any account spend an extra day outside it, and she made up her mind that she would certainly go back next day."
"It is the greatest mistake to think that man is always one and the same. A man is never the same for long. He is continually changing. He seldom remains the same even for half an hour."
"When the train stopped, when she got off and heard the concrete of the platform under her heels, she felt light, lifted, impelled to action. She started off, walking fast, as if the speed of her steps could give form to the things she felt."
"Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics."
"Doesn't there, in fact, exist something that is dearer to almost every man than his own very best interests, or - not to violate logic - some best good ... which is more important and higher than any other good, and for the sake of which man is prepared if necessary to go against all the laws, against, that is, reason, honour, peace and quiet, prosperity - in short against all those fine and advantageous things - only to attain that primary, best good which is dearer to him than all else?"
"If religion cannot restrain evil, it cannot claim effective power for good."
"Technique is what you fall back on when you run out of inspiration."
"Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking-that the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide of action-that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise-that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality-that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind-that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one's consciousness."
"In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful."
"Anna Petrovna: Do you know what, Kolya? Try and sing, laugh, get angry, as you once did... You stay in, we'll laugh and drink fruit liqueur and we'll drive away your depression in a flash. I'll sing if you like. Or else let's go and sit in the dark in your study as we used to, and you'll tell me about your depression... You have such suffering eyes. I'll look into them and cry, and we'll both feel better."
"A dream is a strange thing. Pictures appear with terrifying clarity, the minutest details engraved like pieces of jewelry, and yet we leap unawares through huge abysses of time and space. Dreams seem to be controlled by wish rather than reason, the heart rather than the head"and yet, what clever, tricky convolutions my reason sometimes makes while I'm asleep! Things quite beyond comprehension happen to reason in dreams!"
"I love it when people lie! Lying is only man's privilege over all other organisms. Lying is what makes me a man."
"Russia also declared its independence. This was approved by the Supreme Soviet, and you know and remember that there was the Declaration on the Independence of Russia."
"Never for one minute have I taken you for reality . . . You are a lie, you are my illness, you are a phantom . . . You are my hallucination. You are the incarnation of myself . . . of my thoughts and feelings, but only the nastiest and stupidest of them."
"There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another-if men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked, that lies do not work, that the unearned cannot be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that the destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't."
"I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure."
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