Quotes by Russian authors

See the complete list of authors from Russia

"I shot with it a lot. I still do now. That is why I am hard of hearing"

Mikhail Kalashnikov, Inventor

Mikhail Gorbachev

"If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you haven't done much today"

Mikhail Gorbachev, Statesman

"Sometimes in the dark of night I begin to think. And I wonder if Lee started all this violence"

Marina Oswald, Celebrity

"Both now and for always, I intend to hold fast to my belief in the hidden strength of the human spirit"

Andrei Sakharov, Physicist

"We should not pour muck on ourselves"

Leonid I. Brezhnev, Statesman

"There is no justice among men"

Nicholas II, Royalty

"Well we really meant you to visit Paris in May, but the rhythm required two syllables"

Vernon Duke, Composer

Fanny Kaplan

"After the Revolution I was freed. I favoured the Constituent Assembly and am still for it"

Fanny Kaplan, Activist

"A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one"

Dimitri Shostakovich, Composer

"Close contact between science and the practice of collective farms and State farms creates inexhaustible opportunities for the development of theoretical knowledge, enabling us to learn ever more and more about the nature of living bodies and the soil"

Trofim Lysenko, Celebrity

"Marxism is a revolutionary worldview that must always struggle for new revelations"

Rosa Luxemburg, Activist

"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"

Mary Antin, Activist

"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"

Ivan Pavlov, Psychologist

"As I understand I took most so-called democratic states about 200 years on average to build their democracies. That is why, when we go to sleep under totalitarian rule and wake up in a democracy, it makes me laugh"

Aleksandr Lebed, Politician

"When you play Bobby, it is not a question if you win or lose. It is a question if you survive"

Boris Spassky, Celebrity

"Chess is my life, but my life is not chess"

Anatoly Karpov, Celebrity

"I lived and languished"

Andrei Platonov, Writer

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"It is the artist who realizes that there is a supreme force above him and works gladly away as a small apprentice under God's heaven"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"The clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you - you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power - he's free again"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one's well-being"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

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