Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 15

no one sleeps more beautifully than you. But i am afraid that you will waken just now, and touch me with an indifferent glance, lightly passing, and commit the murder of beauty.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill.
Vladimir Nabokov
Schoolboys are a merciless race, individually they are angels, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
High School: Oh, man. This is where boys and girls go from tweens to teens and become complicated and cruel. Girls play sick mind games; boys try to pull each other's penises off and throw them in the bushes. If you can, buy the most expensive jeans in a two-hundred-mile radius of your town and wear them on your first day. If anyone asks how you could afford them say that your father is the president of Ashton Kutcher. When they are like, 'Ashton Kutcher has a president?' answer, 'Yes.' Everyone will be in awe of you and you won't have to go through a lot of pain and cat fights.
Eugene Mirman
Equality is to be found only in the spiritual dignity of man
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Equality lies only in human moral dignity. ... Let there be brothers first, then there will be brotherhood, and only then will there be a fair sharing of goods among brothers.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A dream is a strange thing. Pictures appear with terrifying clarity, the minutest details engraved like pieces of jewelry, and yet we leap unawares through huge abysses of time and space. Dreams seem to be controlled by wish rather than reason, the heart rather than the head–and yet, what clever, tricky convolutions my reason sometimes makes while I’m asleep! Things quite beyond comprehension happen to reason in dreams!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
She had only two modes of operation: complete control or complete insanity.
Ilona Andrews
Mom?" Mother turned to Grandmother."What?""She's going to lunch with her kidnapper!""Take a picture for me," Grandma said.
Ilona Andrews
Investigating Koreiko's case might take a long time," said Ostap. "God only knows how long. And since there is no God, nobody knows. We are in a terrible bind.
Ilya Ilf
…but it is in despair that the most burning pleasures occur, especially when one is all too highly conscious of the hopelessness of one’s position.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Trudging on foot, loaded with sacks, bundles, and babies, young mothers who had lost their milk, driven out of their minds by the horrors of the journey, abandoned their children, shook the corn out of their sacks onto the ground, and turned back. A quick death, they had decided, was preferable to a slow death by starvation. Better to fall into the clutches of the enemy than to be torn to pieces by some beast in the forest.
Boris Pasternak
…but it is in despair that the most burning pleasures occur…
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
They were tough and sour, but as Pushkin said, 'Dearer to us than a host of truths is an exalting illusion.' I saw a happy man, whose cherished dream had so obviously come true, who had attained his goal in life, had gotten what he wanted, who was content with his fate and with himself. For some reason there had always been something sad mixed with my thoughts about human happiness, but now, at the sight of a happy man, I was overcome by an oppressive feeling close to despair.- Gooseberries
Anton Chekhov
Ivanov: I am a bad, pathetic and worthless individual. One needs to be pathetic, too, worn out and drained by drink, like Pasha, to be still fond of me and to respect me. My God, how I despise myself! I so deeply loathe my voice, my walk, my hands, these clothes, my thoughts. Well, isn't that funny, isn't that shocking? Less than a year ago I was healthy and strong, I was cheerful, tireless, passionate, I worked with these very hands, I could speak to move even Philistines to tears, I could cry when I saw grief, I became indignant when I encountered evil. I knew inspiration, I knew the charm and poetry of quiet nights when from dusk to dawn you sit at your desk or indulge you mind with dreams. I believed, I looked into the future as into the eyes of my own mother... And now, my God, I am exhausted, I do not believe, I spend my days and nights in idleness.
Anton Chekhov
She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer.
Vladimir Nabokov
Man can't handle the chaos. Oh, you can understand it in the abstract, as long as you don't think about it too hard. But at the core of it, whenever humans come against chaos, they deal with it in one of three ways. ... Faced with chaos you will either ignore it, dance around it, or you will go mad.
Ilona Andrews
Everything made by human hands looks terrible under magnification--crude, rough, and asymmetrical. But in nature every bit of life is lovely. And the more magnification we use, the more details are brought out, perfectly formed, like endless sets of boxes within boxes.
Roman Vishniac
Love the animals. God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Don't trouble it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The whole horror of the situation is that he now has a human heart, not a dog's heart. And about the rottenest heart in all creation!
Mikhail Bulgakov
If a man aspires to a righteous life, his first act of abstinence if from injury to animals.
Leo Tolstoy
Generally speaking, our prisoners were capable of loving animals, and if they had been allowed they would have delighted to rear large numbers of domestic animals and birds in the prison. And I wonder what other activity could better have softened and refined their harsh and brutal natures than this. But it was not allowed. Neither the regulations nor the nature of the prison made it possible.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.
Dmitry Merezhkovsky
People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
When you know the destination, the path is easy.
Ratmir Timashev
And is it not sects, bodies of definite, uncompromising principles, that lead us into revolutions?
Vladimir Lenin
Transcending class distinctions, the speaker [Stalin] portrays the relation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as a mere division of labor. The workers and soldiers achieve the revolution, Guchkov and Miliukov “fortify” it.[…] This superintendent’s approach to the historical process is exactly characteristic of the leaders of Menshevism, this handing out of instructions to various classes and then patronizingly criticizing their fulfillment.
Leon Trotsky
The principles of liberalism can have a real existence only in conjunction with a police system. Anarchism is an attempt to cleanse liberalism of the police. But just as pure oxygen is impossible to breathe, so liberalism without the police principle means the death of society. Being a shadow-caricature of liberalism, anarchism as a whole has shared its fate. Having killed liberalism, the development of class contradictions has also killed anarchism. Like every sect which founds its teaching not upon the actual development of human society, but upon the reduction to absurdity of one of its features, anarchism explodes like a soap bubble at that moment when the social contradictions arrive at the point of war or revolution.
Leon Trotsky
The concurrence of two elements is necessary for bringing about a revolution; and by revolution I do not mean the street warfare, nor the bloody conflicts of two parties—both being mere incidents dependent upon many circumstances—but the sudden overthrow of institutions which are the outgrowths of centuries past, the sudden uprising of new ideas and new conceptions, and the attempt to reform all political and economical institutions in a radical way—all at the same time. Two separate currents must converge to come to that result: a widely spread economic revolt, tending to change the economical conditions of the masses, and a political revolt, tending to modify the very essence of the political organisation—an economical change, supported by an equally important change of political institutions.
Pyotr Kropotkin
The boycott of parliamentary institutions on the part of anarchists and semianarchists is dictated by a desire not to submit their weakness to a test on the part of the masses, thus preserving their right to an inactive hauteur which makes no difference to anybody. A revolutionary party can turn its back to a parliament only if it has set itself the immediate task of overthrowing the existing regime.
Leon Trotsky
The hide was being flayed off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip in to it; as for the red bloody meat, the steaming innards - they were being thrown onto the scrapheap. The new age needed only the hide of the Revolution - and this was being flayed off people who were still alive. Those who slipped into it spoke the language of the Revolution and mimicked it's gestures, but their brains, lungs, livers and eyes were utterly different.
Vasily Grossman
It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life-- as if life could be put off for a time-- what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions-- his own, personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it-- the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures, but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice.
Boris Pasternak
For the information of these “friends” who consider themselves called to defend against us the role of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, we give warning that our book teaches not how to love a victorious revolution after the event, in the person of the bureaucracy it has brought forward, but only how a revolution is prepared,how it develops, and how it conquers. A party is not for us a machine whosesinlessness is to be defended by state measures of repression, but a complicated organism that like all living things develops in contradictions.
Leon Trotsky
The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow (in the Book of Genesis days are equal to years, ages). But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless. Those who plot impossible upheavals among us, are either young and do not know our people, or are hard-hearted men who do not care a straw either about their own lives or those of others.
Alexander Pushkin
They destroy lives with work. What for? They rob men of their lives. What for, I ask? My master—I lost my life in the textile mill of Nefidov—my master presented one prima donna with a golden wash basin. Every one of her toilet articles was gold. That basin holds my life-blood, my very life. That's for what my life went! A man killed me with work in order to comfort his mistress with my blood. He bought her a gold wash basin with my blood.
Maxim Gorky
Those——"—here he flung out a terrible oath—"those people don't know what their blind hands are sowing. They will know when our power is complete and we begin to mow down their cursed grass. They'll know it then!
Maxim Gorky
This is the way it ought to be!" said the Little Russian, returning. "Because, mark you, mother dear, a new heart is coming into existence, a new heart is growing up in life. All hearts are smitten in the conflict of interests, all are consumed with a blind greed, eaten up with envy, stricken, wounded, and dripping with filth, falsehood, and cowardice. All people are sick; they are afraid to live; they wander about as in a mist. Everyone feels only his own toothache. But lo, and behold! Here is a Man coming and illuminating life with the light of reason, and he shouts: 'Oh, ho! you straying roaches! It's time, high time, for you to understand that all your interests are one, that everyone has the need to live, everyone has the desire to grow!' The Man who shouts this is alone, and therefore he cries aloud; he needs comrades, he feels dreary in his loneliness, dreary and cold. And at his call the stanch hearts unite into one great, strong heart, deep and sensitive as a silver bell not yet cast. And hark! This bell rings forth the message: 'Men of all countries, unite into one family! Love is the mother of life, not hate!' My brothers! I hear this message sounding through the world!
Maxim Gorky
When leaders betray their people and the people don't overthrow them, it's not just the leaders who should be blamed.
Sergei Lukyanenko
And how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one. The number of revolutions is infinite.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The principle of laughter and the carnival spirit on which the grotesque is based destroys this limited seriousness and all pretense of an extratemporal meaning and unconditional value of necessity. It frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities. For this reason, great changes, even in the field of science, are always preceded by a certain carnival consciousness that prepares the way.
Mikhail Bakhtin
In reality the mere privations is not enoughto cause an insurrection: if it were the masses would always be in revolt
Trotsky
Logic is the science not of external forms of thought, but of the laws of development "of all material, natural and spiritual things", i.e., of the development of the entire concrete content of the world and of its cognition, i.e., the sum-total, the conclusion of the History of knowledge of the world.
Vladimir Lenin
O masses, o masses! When will you assume the image and likeness of your avant-garde?
Andrei Platonov
N-no-o, all that excitement, it wouldn't reach us,' Timosha spoke gloomily. 'We're like the sunken city of Kitezh, living at the bottom of the lake. We do not hear a thing, and the water over us is muddy and sleepy. And on the surface, way above - why, everything's in flames, and the alarms are ringing.' (“A Provincial Tale”)
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Carelessness on the part of revolutionaries has always been the best aid the police have.
Victor Serge
We seek to uncoverbehind the events changes in the collective consciousness. We reject wholesale references to the “spontaneity” of the movement, references which in most casesexplain nothing and teach nobody. Revolutions take place according to certain laws. This does not mean that the masses in action are aware of the laws of revolution, but it does mean that the changes in mass consciousness are not accidental, but are subject to an objective necessity which is capable of theoretic explanation, and thus makes both prophecy and leadership possible.
Leon Trotsky
Revolution is everywhere, in everything. There is no final revolution, no final number.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The East is unfamiliar with those confessions, memoirs, and autobiographies so beloved in the West. There is a clear difference in tonality. One's gaze never lingers on the suffering humanity of Christ, but penetrates behind the kenotic veil. To the West's mysticism of the Cross and its veneration of the Sacred Heart corresponds the eastern mysticism of the sealed tomb, from which eternal life eternal wells up.
Paul Evdokimov
The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy. (“Tomorrow”)
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Nothing kills a party like an oversize metal hedgehog.
Ilona Andrews
if [God] doesn't exist, man is the chief of the earth, of the universe. Magnificent! Only how is he going to be good without God?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It is different with the upper classes. They, following science, want to base justice on reason alone, but not with Christ, as before, and they have already proclaimed that there is no crime, that there is no sin. And that's consistent, for if you have no God what is the meaning of crime?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I did dream of it, chiefly because 'all things are lawful.' That was quite right what you taught me, for you talked a lot to me about that. For if there's no everlasting God, there's no such thing as virtue, and there's no need of it.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
People tend to think that mathematicians always work in sterile conditions, sitting around and staring at the screen of a computer, or at a ceiling, in a pristine office. But in fact, some of the best ideas come when you least expect them, possibly through annoying industrial noise.
Edward Frenkel
Profound thoughts arise only in debate, with a possibility of counterargument, only when there is a possibility of expressing not only correct ideas, but also dubious ideas.
Andrei Sakharov
There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
...capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling.
Leon Trotsky
It's true that private enterprise is extremely flexible, But its only good within very narrow limits. If private enterprise isn't held in an iron grip it gives birth to people who are no better than beasts, those stock-exchange people with greedy appetites beyond restraint.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Every historical form of society is in its foundation a form of organization of labor. While every previous form of society was an organization of labor in the interests of a minority, which organized its State apparatus for the oppression of the overwhelming majority of the workers, we are making the first attempt in world history to organize labor in the interests of the laboring majority itself.
Leon Trotsky