Quotes by Belarusian Authors

I remembered some lines from the papers: our nuclear stations are absolutely safe, we could build one on Red Square, they're safer than samovars. They're like stars and we'll "light" the whole earth with them.
Svetlana Alexievich
Miracles sometimes occur but one has to work terribly hard for them.
Chaim Weizmann
Whatever course you have chosen for yourself it will not be a chore but an adventure if you bring to it a sense of the glory of striving ... if your sights are set far above the merely secure and mediocre.
David Sarnoff
All our interior world is reality - and that perhaps more so than our apparent world.
Marc Chagall
Poetry is not a profession it's a destiny.
Mikhail Dudan
All colours are the friends of their neighbours and the lovers of their opposites.
Marc Chagall
Time is a river without banks.
Marc Chagall
All our interior world is reality - and that perhaps more so than our apparent world.
Marc Chagall
Poetry is not a profession it's a destiny.
Mikhail Dudan
All colours are the friends of their neighbours and the lovers of their opposites.
Marc Chagall
Time is a river without banks.
Marc Chagall
In our life there is a single color as on an artist's palette which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.
Marc Chagall
Whatever course you have chosen for yourself it will not be a chore but an adventure if you bring to it a sense of the glory of striving if your sights are set far above the merely secure and mediocre.
David Sarnoff
A life that hasn't a definite plan is likely to become driftwood.
David Sarnoff
The fingers must be educated the thumb is born knowing.
Marc Chagall
In my youth poverty enriched me but now I can afford wealth.
Marc Chagall
Someone ought to publish a book about the doomsayers who keep publishing books about the end of publishing.
Evgeny Morozov
I had only to open my bedroom window, and blue air, love, and flowers entered with her”.
Marc Chagall
If the only hammer you are given is the Internet, it's not surprising that every possible social and political problem is presented as an online nail.
Evgeny Morozov
We were told that we had to win. Against whom? The atom? Physics? The universe? Victory is not an event for us, but a process.
Svetlana Alexievich
Many greeted the truth as an enemy. And freedom as well.
Svetlana Alexievich
Why didn't we put Stalin on trial? I'll tell you why...In order to condemn Stalin, you'd have to condemn your friends and relatives along with him. The people closest to you...our neighbor Yuri turned out to have been the one who informed on my father. For nothing, as my mother would say...When Yeltsin came to power, I got a copy of his file, which included several informants' reports. It turned out that one of them had been written by Aunt Olga...his niece...a beautiful woman, full of joy...It's not just Stalin and Beria, it's also our neighbor Yuri and beautiful Aunt Olga...
Svetlana Alexievich
It's certainly true that Chernobyl, while an accident in the sense that no one intentionally set it off, was also the deliberate product of a culture of cronyism, laziness, and a deep-seated indifference toward the general population. The literature on the subject is pretty unanimous in its opinion that the Soviet system had taken a poorly designed reactor adn then staffed it with a group of incompetents. It then proceeded, as the interviews in this book attest, to lie about the disaster in the most criminal way. In the crucial first ten days, when the reactor core was burning and releasing a steady stream of highly radioactive material into the surrounding areas, the authorities repeatedly claimed that the situation was under control. . . In the week after the accident, while refusing to admit to the world that anything really serious had gone wrong, the Soviets poured thousands of men into the breach. . . The machines they brought broke down because of the radiation. The humans wouldn't break down until weeks or months later, at which point they'd die horribly.
Svetlana Alexievich
Back then everyone was saying: "We're going to die, we're going to die. By the year 2000, there won't be any Belarussians left.
Svetlana Alexievich
At that time my notions of nuclear power were utterly idyllic. At school and at the university we'd been taught that this was a magical factory that made "energy out of nothing," where people in white robes sat and pushed buttons. Chernobyl blew up when we weren't prepared.
Svetlana Alexievich
We must not fixate on what this new arsenal of digital technologies allows us to do without first inquiring what is worth doing.
Evgeny Morozov
If Amazon’s dream of a world without gatekeepers becomes reality, then the company itself will become a powerful gatekeeper.
Evgeny Morozov
The Pirates' most advanced and widely discussed technological innovation is an online system called LiquidFeedback, which allows the party to better understand what its members think about issues of the day. Here is how it works: Any member of the party can register (with the optino of using a pseudonym) with LiquidFeedback and propose that the Pirates should do x. If more than 10 percent of other members find this proposal intriguing, it passes to the next stage, in which party members can vote for or against it.After the proposal has been submitted, and before it has moved to the voting stage, other party members can launch counterproposals on a similar subject or make suggestions about how to improve the original one. What's interesting is that party members can transfer their votes to those they consider more knowledgeable about a given subject; thus, someone recognized as an expert on transportation policy might end up casting ten votes rather than one. To prevent some such experts from accumulating and abusing power, transferred votes can be recalled to their original "ownders." The votes cast in LiquidFeedback are not bniding; they simply inform party officials about the views of the grass roots. Big policy proposals are still discussed and voted upon at the party congress. LiquidFeedback thus aims to provide the intellectual inputs to the Pirates' work; the outputs are still determined by rather conventional means.This all sounds great in theory...but the reality is much grimmer. In one German region, reports Der Spiegel, the Pirates used LiquidFeedback to gather general opinions on only two issues, while only twenty votes were cast in the controversial law on circumcision.
Evgeny Morozov
One would think that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, the intellectual poverty of technocracy and the primacy of politics over it would be a well-established truth in need of no further defense.
Evgeny Morozov
The goal of privacy is not to protect some stable self from erosion but to create boundaries where this self can emerge, mutate, and stabilize.
Evgeny Morozov
Social Media= Business. Period.
Gary Vaynerchuk
Being authentic, and being perceived as such by your audience, relies on your ability to ensure that every decision you make when it comes to your business is rooted in being true to yourself.
Gary Vaynerchuk
I have learned to have more trust in the scientist than he does in himself.
David Sarnoff
Instead of lullabies, my mother would sing us songs of the Revolution. Now she sings them to her grandchildren. 'Are you nuts?' I ask her. She replies, 'I don't know any other songs.
Svetlana Alexievich
If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.
Marc Chagall
Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl--there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic.
Svetlana Alexievich
Love and fantasy, go hand in hand.
Marc Chagall
When I see a garden in flower, then I believe in God for a second. But not the rest of the time
Svetlana Alexievich
Pretty soon, I'll be decomposing into phosphorous, calcium, and so on. Who else will you find to tell you the truth? All that's left are the archives. Pieces of paper. And the truth is... I worked at an archive myself, I can tell you first hand: paper lies even more than people do.
Svetlana Alexievich
All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.
Marc Chagall
In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.
Marc Chagall
Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.
Marc Chagall
The mysterious Russian soul... Everyone wants to understand it. They read Dostoevsky: what's behind that soul of theirs? Well, behind our soul there's just more soul.
Svetlana Alexievich
A woman lives a life of contradictions wrapped inside paradoxes wrapped inside a big candy wrapper.
Boris Fishman
I'm afraid of freedom, it feels like some drunk guy could show up and burn my dacha at any moment.
Svetlana Alexievich
How were you taken prisoner?' The interrogator asked my father. 'The Finns pulled me out of a lake.' 'You traitor! You were saving your own skin instead of the Motherland.' My father also considered himself guilty. That's how they'd been trained.
Svetlana Alexievich
Is there anything more frightening than people?
Svetlana Alexievich
You may not have connections, or an education, or wealth, but with enough passion and sweat, you can make anything happen.
Gary Vaynerchuk
If you really want to dominate the competition and make big bucks, you’ve got to be the best. Do that, be that, and no one will be able to touch you. With one exception. Someone with less passion and talent and poorer content can totally beat you if they’re willing to work longer and harder than you are. Hustle is it.
Gary Vaynerchuk
There's no such thing as perfect. Chasing ''Perfect'' is the shortest road to not achieving it.
Gary Vaynerchuk
Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.
Svetlana Alexievich