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Quotes by Russian Authors
"All psychological research is completely barred by the interpretations of the psychoanalysts. Everything happens in the unconscious, and I don't know what this unconscious is."
"Anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary."
"Happiness will come from materialism, not from meaning."
"This scepticism is the same scepticism I heard a generation ago in the USSR when few thought that a democratic transformation behind the iron curtain was possible."
"When you've nothing to live for, you get to thinking inside your head."
"A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him."
"How many people in the world is, each of them is individual. And I like to eat bread, somebody don't like that. You know this is the same in gymnastics."
"The path towards a free society has not been simple. There are tragic and glorious pages in our history."
"If a teacher has only love for the cause, it will be a good teacher. If a teacher has only love for student, as a father, mother, he will be better than the teacher, who read all the books, but has no love for the cause, nor to the students. If the teacher combines love to the cause and to his disciples, he is the perfect teacher."
"The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness."
"The greatest wisdom is to realize one's lack of it."
"Yet, the Universe is real enough to the conscious beings in it, which are as unreal as it is itself."
"The feelings resembled memories, but memories of what? Apparently one can remember things that have never happened."
"The worst of such stories is that the triumphant romancers can always be put to confusion and crushed by the very details in which real life is so rich and which these unhappy and involuntary story-tellers neglect as insignificant trifles. Oh, they have no thought to spare for such details, their minds are concentrated on their grand invention as a whole, and fancy any one daring to pull them up for a trifle! But that's how they are caught."
"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."
"It's true I always try to be as seductive as possible but I wouldn't be here if I couldn't play tennis."
"Perfect as the wing of a bird may be, it will never enable the bird to fly if unsupported by the air. Facts are the air of science. Without them a man of science can never rise."
"It has long been known for sure that the sight of tasty food makes a hungry man's mouth water; also lack of appetite has always been regarded as an undesirable phenomenon, from which one might conclude that appetite is essentially linked with the process of digestion."
"Let's not talk about Communism. Communism was just and idea, just pie in the sky."
"And, in nineteen seventy two Olympic Games I wasn't really going to be a star, and overnight I became a star."
"Russia should support globalization. The Internet can develop in Russia in a very speedy way."
"A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor - such is my idea of happiness."
"His struggle for a bare living left him no time to take advantage of the public evening school. In time he learned to read, to follow a conversation or lecture; but he never learned to write correctly; and his pronunciation remains extremely foreign to this day."
"If we had had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes."
"Would it be possible to stand still on one spot more majestically - while simulating a triumphant march forward - than it is done by the two English Houses of Parliament?"
"Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction."
"If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?"
"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."
"Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever."
"Don't become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin."
"There are no two countries with the same style of economic mechanism, with the same capitalism."
"The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good."
"The human element, the human flaw and the human nobility - those are the reasons that chess matches are won or lost."
"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."
"Loving the same man or woman all your life, why, that's like supposing the same candle could last you all your life."
"A creative element is surely present in all great systems, and it does not seem possible that all sympathy or fundamental attitudes of will can be entirely eliminated from any human philosophy."
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