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Quotes by Russian Authors


"The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses."

"When I played Bobby Fischer, my opponent fought against organizations - the television producers and the match organizers. But he never fought against me personally. I lost to Bobby before the match because he was already stronger than I. He won normally."

"If you cry 'forward', you must without fail make plain in what direction to go."

"Don't become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin."


"Capitalists are no more capable of self-sacrifice than a man is capable of lifting himself up by his own bootstraps."


"You must obey the law, always, not only when they grab you by your special place."

"From each according to his faculties; to each according to his needs."

"The passion for destruction is also a creative passion."

"I believe there is a direct correlation between love and laughter."


"It is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws."


"We don't need this religious cosmopolitanism. It's no good."

"In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time."

"It can't be that life is so senseless and horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and senseless, why must I die and die in agony? There is something wrong!"

"We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there's no altering that."

"The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper. He thought-while his hand moved rapidly-what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists have not discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words."

"But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice, to their fate. I wonder, for it is hard for me to conceive how men who knew the word "I," could give it up and not know what they lost. But such has been the story, for I have lived in the City of the damned, and I know what horror men permitted to be brought upon them."

"Nowadays there is more dynamism in chess, modern players like to take the initiative. Usually they are poor defenders though."

"If coming events are said to cast their shadows before, past events cannot fall to leave their impress behind them."

"Appetite, craving for food, is a constant and powerful stimulator of the gastric glands."

"Bobby Fischer has an enormous knowledge of chess and his familiarity with the chess literature of the USSR is immense."

"To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's."

"Our success was mainly due to the fact that we stimulated the nerves of animals that easily stood on their own feet and were not subjected to any painful stimulus either during or immediately before stimulation of their nerves."

"You must write for children in the same way as you do for adults, only better."

"Napoleon is a torrent which as yet we are unable to stem. Moscow will be the sponge that will suck him dry."

"At one time,' Golenishchev continued, either not observing or not willing to observe that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, 'at one time a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conception of religion, law, and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed. They grow up in ideas of negation in everything -- in other words, utter savages."

"It goes without saying that the desire to accomplish the task with more confidence, to avoid wasting time and labour, and to spare our experimental animals as much as possible, made us strictly observe all the precautions taken by surgeons in respect to their patients."

"The physiologist who succeeds in penetrating deeper and deeper into the digestive canal becomes convinced that it consists of a number of chemical laboratories equipped with various mechanical devices."

"Thanks to our present surgical methods in physiology we can demonstrate at any time almost all phenomena of digestion without the loss of even a single drop of blood, without a single scream from the animal undergoing the experiment."

"If any foreign minister begins to defend to the death a "peace conference," you can be sure his government has already placed its orders for new battleships and airplanes."

"This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other."
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