Quotes by Writers - Page 44

The Soviet state was, in fact, almost perfectly designed to make people unhappy. It denied its citizens not just hope, but also trust. Every activity had to be sanctioned by the state. Any person could be an informant. No action could be guaranteed to be without consequence. Father Dmitry preached friendship and warmth and belief to his parishioners, and inspired a generation to live as humans and not as parts of a machine.
Oliver Bullough
In this way, the Church was a true reflection of the whole of Russian society. The KGB and the Russian people had penetrated each other to such an extent that they could not be separated. The culture of betrayal and suspicion and distrust that the KGB relied on had become part of the national culture, poisoning politics in the 1990s and beyond: decades of corruption, murder and sordid sex scandals. If it cannot purge itself, however, the Russian nation will never rid itself of the illness that has driven people to alcohol. Russians need to trust each other again.
Oliver Bullough
Economics is not the central problem of this century. It is a relative problem which can be solved in relative ways. Faith is the central problem of this age. The Western world does not know it, but it already possesses the answer to this problem-but only provided that its faith in God and the freedom He enjoins is as great as Communism's faith in Man.
Whittaker Chambers
It [Communism] is not new. It is, in fact, man's second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: "Ye shall be as gods." It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man's relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.It is the vision of man's mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man's liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man's destiny and reorganizing man's life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in his image, but because man's mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. Copernicus and his successors displaced man as the central fact of the universe by proving that the earth was not the central star of the universe. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple method of denying God.
Whittaker Chambers
(on visiting the USSR after Stalin regime installed)All right, I can see the broken eggs. Now where's this omelette of yours?
Panait Istrati
The Communist leaders respect only firmness and have contempt for persons who continually give in to them.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Communism is as crude an attempt to explain society and the individual as if a surgeon were to perform his delicate operations with a meat ax. All that is subtle in human psychology and in the structure of society (which is even more complex), all of this is reduced to crude economic processes. The whole created being—man—is reduced to matter. It is characteristic that Communism is so devoid of arguments that it has none to advance against its opponents in our Communist countries. It lacks arguments and hence there is the club, the prison, the concentration camp, and insane asylums with forced confinement.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
All Communist Parties, upon attaining power, have become completely merciless. But at the stage before they achieve power, it is necessary to use disguises.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
You have theoreticians who say, "The U.S. must stop the process of nuclear armament. We have enough already. Today America has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the other half of the world. Why should we need more than that?" Let the American nuclear specialists reason this way if they want, but for some reason the nuclear specialists of the Soviet Union—and the leaders of the Soviet Union—think differently.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
No one, even as a joke, could call a member of the all-Union Communist Party a Neo-Hegelian, a Neo-Kantian, a Subjectivist, an Agnostic, or, God forbid, a Revisionist. But "epicurean" sounded so harmless it could not possibly imply that one was not an orthodox Marxist.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
And even in the fever of epidemic arrests, when people leaving for work said farewell to their families every day, because they could not be certain they would return at night, even then almost no one tried to run away and only in rare cases did people commit suicide. And that was exactly what was required. A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
[It is b]etter to die on the losing side than to live under communisim.
Whittaker Chambers
The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.
Hilaire Belloc
He who recollects a thing by which he was once pleased desires to possess it in the same circumstances as when he first was pleased by it. He who was never pleased is doomed to an eternal hard-on.
Aleksandar Hemon
Faster than the devil *times* Sharper than wind! That's the ultimate law of the hero!!
Masashi Kishimoto
If I have to dangle myself in the water like a freaking minnow, I will. Those people don't deserve this type of treatment. ~Willow Mosby (Exposing ELE)
Rebecca Gober
The Howeitat spread out along the cliffs to return the peasants' fire. This manner of going displeased Auda, the old lion, who raged that a mercenary village folk should dare to resist their secular masters, the Abu Tayi. So he jerked his halter, cantered his mare down the path, and rode out plain to view beneath the easternmost houses of the village. There he reined in, and shook a hand at them, booming in his wonderful voice: 'Dogs, do you not know Auda?' When they realized it was that implacable son of war their hearts failed them, and an hour later Sherif Nasir in the town-house was sipping tea with his guest the Turkish Governor, trying to console him for the sudden change of fortune.
T.E. Lawrence
No one wants to go through life alone, fighting battles single-handedly their whole life. Not even the hardiest of heroes. That’s just a miserable existence. Everyone needs someone in their corner, right?...Even if you could,” I wrinkled my brow, “would you really want to? By all accounts, it gets lonely being your own hero.
J.M. Richards
It is an extraordinary thing to meet your heroes and find them to be everything you hoped they would be.
Simon Pegg
I die without seeing the dawn brighten over my native land. You who have it to see, welcome it ... and forget not those who have fallen during the night!
José Rizal
That’s no little kid. That’s Jason Steed, the biggest damn hero you will ever see!
Mark A. Cooper
Every man alive is half idiot & half hero. Only heroes could survive in this maelstrom & only idiots would want to.
Rex Stout
For a hero is someone who is selfless. Think about it, friends. Superman, Luke Skywalker, and Captain America. They are helping others. They aren’t only thinking for themselves. They are reaching out beyond themselves.
Mark Andrew Poe
I’ll tell you what time it is. It is time to be a hero.
Mark Andrew Poe
The world is not fair. That's why it needs heroes. Play fair. Be a hero.
Mark Andrew Poe
Not just in America. When I left my primary school, my father said, 'Son, you are now a man,' then he gave me a scented candle and told me how babies are made." Vik fought to keep his lips from twitching.
S.J. Kincaid
And came to her a realization that the largest humiliation for the person was a lie. And the viler the one to whom you lie, the greater is the humiliation.
Osyp Nazaruk
God creates the beauty. Through my camera, I am a witness.
Mark Denman
God creates the beauty. My camera and I are a witness.
Mark Denman
By shooting the darkest areas three zones lighter, you turned a black, lifeless max black zone 0 into a zone 3. I think, in life, most of us did this all the time.
A.S. King
As Marcel Proust understood, memory is not exclusively or even predominantly visual. It is synesthetic, a combination and even a confusion of the senses that no simple image can reach or encapsulate. A photograph can act as a spur to memory, it can yield treasures, like looking under your bed and finding the baseball card you were certain you lost. But an image stands mute before the inexpressible delicacy, horror, humor, and associative complexity of our experience.
Will Steacy
If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under-world in a second, and examined it at leisure.
H.G.Wells
We cannot teach children the danger of lying to men without feeling as men, the greater danger of lying to children.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
There is no matter what children should learn first, any more than what leg you should put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the meantime your backside is bare. Sire, while you stand considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learn't 'em both.
Samuel Johnson
Where exactly does it come from, I’d like to know, this ineradicable attitude of superiority toward the past? This stubbornly dumb, can’t-kill-it-with-an-ax conviction that we, the now, critically and categorically know better than they, the past. Is it from the mere fact that their future is known to us, that we know what happens? (Nothing good.) It’s much the way we treat small children— pedantic and permissive at the same time. And we always think of the people of the past — just as we do of children — as being naïve in everything from their clothes and hairstyles to their thoughts and feelings.
Oksana Zabuzhko
Ah,' thought the king sadly, shrugging his shoulders, "I see clearly that if one has a crazy wife, one cannot avoid being a fool.'("Queen Fantasque")
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The town isn't big enough for two homicidal maniacs.
Jeph Loeb
I gazed upon the earth and saw that a body, in its tender faithlessness, had located it in the sky. A splendid scarf of blood, looming above the abyss.
Joë Bousquet
Bursts of gold on lavender melting into saffron. It's the time of day when the sky looks like it has been spray-painted by a graffiti artist.
Mia Kirshner
We learn that all life is scarce yet abundant. Profane yet sacred. Loving yet hateful. Enlightened yet obscured. Isolated yet collective. That life is somehow derived from love.
A.P. Sweet
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Facebook, starving hysterical naked,dragging themselves through photo slideshows at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connections of their youth through the machinery of night, who clicking and poking and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural brightness of tiny screens floating across the tops of cities contemplating likes, who bared their brains to the network and saw who got pregnant and who got fat and who’s living the life best lived by posting Instagrams of themselves staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through newly cropped profile pics with radiant cool eyes obsessing over whose ex’s new lover is the best looking ex-lover’s lover, who breaking their backs falling out of ergonomic chairs while shouting into the icy streets, Everybody look how clever I am, Look how much fun I am having, Look at this amazing party I went to, Look at how well-liked I am, Look at my effortless carefully constructed casual desperate thrown together fun, Everybody look, This is fun, Look, Look, I swear to God I am having so much fun.
Raphael Bob-Waksberg
Do you believe in love at first sight? Or should I tackle you again?
Aileen Erin
Suddenly, she doesn't want to die. She has no real reason not to, no sudden revelation, except that it's equally pointless to die as not to die. Why doesn't she die? She lives because she's meant to live, because she's already alive and it's comparatively easy to stay that way. She lives because, even though she doesn't know what it is, there must be a reason why she's here in the first place. She lives because either she's not as brave as all the dead girls who've gone before her, or she's actually braver - it's hard to tell.
A.M. Homes
You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
We all need something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for.
Dick Van Dyke
Those people cannot enjoy comfortably what God has given them because they see and covet what He has not given them. All of our discontents for what we want appear to me to spring from want of thankfulness for what we have.
Daniel Defoe
If someone wanted to have a grudge against me, or didn't agree with my lifestyle, the way I breathed, the space I took up on this planet, they had an open door to 'report' to the powers that be.
Mark Alders
You get what you work for.
Mark Boyer
Still yourself to steel yourself.
Fakeer Ishavardas
You may be good, but who cannot be better?
Fakeer Ishavardas
Be realistic, Aiden, I told myself. You know your value to the penny and it's measured in inches, time, age, stamina, looks, and being able to put up with gross and sometimes bizarre situations. Personality was far down on a much longer list, and even farther down came intelligence. You should have insisted on having sex.
Aiden Shaw
What we're left with ... is the distinctly uncomfortable sense that much of what we call culture jamming achieves the same effect as traditional marketing. Both rely on the bedrock principle that branding works. Yet marketing has moved on from branding toward a more direct emotional connection to our reptilian brains, which makes it immune to the cognitive dissonance culture jamming creates. In the meantime, the brans being promoted by some activists retain the full integrity of their original message,
Anne Elizabeth Moore
Men whose only concern is other people's opinion of them are like actors who put on a poor performance to win the applause of people of poor taste; some of them would be capable of good acting in front of a good audience. A decent man plays his part to the best of his ability, regardless of the taste of the gallery.
Nicolas Chamfort
Why independence, if the slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow?
José Rizal
Creator of indifferences” is the motto I want for my spirit today. I'd like my life's activity to consist, above all, in educating others to feel more and more for themselves, and less and less according to the dynamic low of collectiveness. To educate people in that spiritual antisepsis which precludes contamination by commonness and vulgarity is the loftiest destiny I can imagine for the pedagogue of inner discipline that I aspire to be. If all who read me would learn – slowly, of course, as the subject matter requires – to be completely insensitive to the other people's opinions and even their glances, that would be enough of a garland to make up for my life's scholastic stagnation.
Pessoa
It’s a marvelous thing, the ocean. For some reason when two people sit together looking out at it, they stop caring whether they talk or stay silent. You never get tired of watching it. And no matter how rough the waves get, you’re never bothered by the noise the water makes by the commotion of the surface - it never seems too loud, or too wild.
Banana Yoshimoto
…And the sound of the sea, like the wild-animal breath of the world itself, frightened them as it gasped and died at their feet.
Leonardo Sciascia
Life is like the ocean. You can either be the ball floating on the waves, or make your own waves.
Oliver Gaspirtz
The sensation of the ocean bearing my weight was the most carefree lightness I’d ever experienced. When we were halfway across the strait, the sound of an engine approached from a distance—it was probably the police coast guard. We quickly ducked under the surface of the water, exposing only the tips of our trunks so we could breathe.
Xi Ni Er