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Quotes by Russian Authors
"An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person's main task in life - becoming a better person."
"If you look for perfection, you'll never be content."
"I don't like being with grown-up people. I've known that a long time. I don't like it because I don't know how to get on with them."
"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."
"I am strongly convinced that the people or society is the best and the most unerring critic."
"But I always liked side-paths, little dark back-alleys behind the main road- there one finds adventures and surprises, and precious metal in the dirt."
"Does it matter whether it was a dream or a reality, if the dream made known to me the truth?"
"It is possible to lead astray an entire generation, to strike it blind, to drive it insane, to direct it towards a false goal. Napoleon proved this."
"I have equal contempt for both left and right radicals."
"Sometimes it happens that the most insane thought, the most impossible conception, will become so fixed in one's head that at length one believes the thought or the conception to be reality. Moreover, if with the thought or the conception there is combined a strong, a passionate, desire, one will come to look upon the said thought or conception as something fated, inevitable, and foreordained-something bound to happen. Whether by this there is connoted something in the nature of a combination of presentiments, or a great effort of will, or a self-annulment of one's true expectations, and so on, I do not know."
"A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one."
"I believe he was feeling a bit nervous. Possibly it was my costume that took him aback. I was dressed quite well, even elegantly, and looked as if I belonged to the best society."
"What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all the palisades, all the fences, within which she is held captive!"
"There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind."
"For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones."
"Nice passion is reading."
"Darwin himself recorded the fact that he accepted the Malthusian idea."
"...if there really is some day discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices - that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical formula - then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to. For who would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of that sort; for what is a man without desires, without freewill and without choice, if not a stop in an organ?"
"This demonstration of power, indifferent to the law, is highly dangerous."
"If nations always moved from one set of furnished rooms to another - and always into a better set - things might be easier, but the trouble is that there is no one to prepare the new rooms. The future is worse than the ocean - there is nothing there."
"The whole order of nature evinces a progressive march towards a higher life."
"Progressively thinking biologists, both in our country and abroad, saw in Darwinism the only right road to the further development of scientific biology."
"The world may end up under a Sword of Damocles on a tightrope over the abyss."
"I explained I wanted to descend as quickly as possible to camp IV in order to warm myself and gather a supply of hot drink and oxygen in the event I might need to go back up the mountain to assist descending climbers."
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for me to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed or enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt."
"The only peace that can be made with a dictator is once that must be based on deterrence. For today, the dictator may be your friend, but tomorrow he will need you as an enemy."
"For 73 years a totalitarian regime ruled the country. Totalitarian regime."
"In thus pointing out certain respects in which philosophy resembles literature more than science, I do not mean, of course, to imply that it would be well for philosophy if it ceased to aim at scientific rigor."
"Slavery is the first step towards civilization. In order to develop it is necessary that things should be much better for some and much worse for others, then those who are better off can develop at the expense of others."
"At the time of the Revolution, dogs howled day and night all over Russia."
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