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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."
"The world believes all blondes are stupid and brunettes are smarter. Well, I disagree."
"Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear."
"God creates, I do not create. I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it - from what I see, from what the dancers can do, from what others do."
"They said you were hard and cold and unfeeling. But it's true...I am, in the sense they mean-only have they ever told you in just what sense they mean it?""What did they mean about you?""Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that .'to feel' is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality."
"You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid-and I know they are-yet I won't be wiser?"
"At the time we were all convinced that we had to speak, write,and publish as quickly as possible and as much as possible and that this was necessary for the good of mankind. Thousands of us published and wrote in an effort to teach others, all the while disclaiming and abusing one another. Without taking note of the fact that we knew nothing, that we did not know the answer to the simplest question of life, the question of what is right and what is wrong, we all went on talking without listening to one another."
"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."
"At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which the blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled."
"Instead of the former divinely appointed aims of the Jewish, Greek, or Roman nations, which ancient historians regarded as representing the progress of humanity, modern history has postulated its own aims- the welfare of the French, German, or English people, or, in its highest abstraction, the welfare and civilization of humanity in general, by which is usually meant that of the peoples occupying a small northwesterly portion of a large continent."
"The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds."
"Powerful states can maintain themselves only by crime, little states are virtuous only by weakness."
"The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization."
"I think it's really important for me not to forget where I came from."
"To rely upon conviction, devotion, and other excellent spiritual qualities; that is not to be taken seriously in politics."
"Chess is an infinitely complex game, which one can play in infinitely numerous and varied ways."
"The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever."
"The passion for destruction is also a creative passion."
"I've just done a commercial in the U.S. in which I talk about stocks, shares and bonds. Everyone is amazed. They ask me: 'You really know about that stuff or did you just learn it for the commercial?' I tell them I wouldn't do it unless I understood and had an interest."
"In and after 1964 when I began to concern myself with the biological issues, and particularly from 1967 onwards, the extent of the problems over which I felt uneasy increased to such a point that in 1968 I felt a compelling urge to make my views public."
"Life is not an easy matter... You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness."
"We learn about life not from plusses alone, but from minuses as well."
"I'd been ready too, because before Olympic Games, I wasn't compete in big competition like, World Championship, like European Championship. I just competed in national competition."
"It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is awry."
"Appetite, craving for food, is a constant and powerful stimulator of the gastric glands."
"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the boot-maker."
"Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end."
"Well, I always know what I want. And when you know what you want-you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don't know. I've forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn't matter, so long as you move."
"No matter how bad things get you got to go on living, even if it kills you."
"Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division; and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts."
"Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking, to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality."
"No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim."
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