#russ

I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here—a sign of unparalleled respect—because they are still capable of living by it. ↗

— Osip Mandelstam

#russia #life

I must add... my gratitude to you for the attention with which you have listened to me, for, from my numerous observations, our Liberals are never capable of letting anyone else have a conviction of his own without at once meeting their opponent with abuse or even something worse. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#nihilism #russia #abuse

Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs. They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the "blaze of passion" often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet. Perhaps their surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the wide expanses they saw on their walks, the rooms in which they lived or met, took more delight in their love than they themselves did. ↗

— Boris Pasternak

#russian #love

Why did you come in to-night with your heads in the air? 'Make way, we are coming! Give us every right and don't you dare breathe a word before us. Pay us every sort of respect, such as no one's ever heard of, and we shall treat you worse than the lowest lackey!' They strive for justice, they stand on their rights, and yet they've slandered him like infidels in their article. We demand, we don't ask, and you will get no gratitude from us, because you are acting for the satisfaction of your own conscience! Queer sort of reasoning!... He has not borrowed money from you, he doesn't owe you anything, so what are you reckoning on, if not his gratitude? So how can you repudiate it? Lunatics! They regard society as savage and inhuman, because it cries shame on the seduced girl; but if you think society inhuman, you must think that the girl suffers from the censure of society, and if she does, how is it you expose her to society in the newspapers and expect her not to suffer? Lunatics! Vain creatures! They don't believe in God, they don't believe in Christ! Why, you are so eaten up with pride and vanity that you'll end by eating up one another, that's what I prophesy. Isn't that topsy-turvydom, isn't it infamy? ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#christianity #conceit #god #liberal #nihilism

Fortunately there is more wealth in the world than there was at the time of the global economic crisis of 1929 - Chinese, Indian, Arab and Russian. ↗

— Karl Lagerfeld

#chinese #crisis #economic #economic crisis #fortunately

He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor's office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time, and he was translating for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients. On my way home, after running into him, I just heard this phrase in my head. ↗

— Jhumoa Lahiri

#doctor #had #head #heard #him

He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor's office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time, and he was translating for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients. On my way home, after running into him, I just heard this phrase in my head. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#doctor #had #head #heard #him

Just five years before that the Russians were our allies. ↗

— Martin Landau

#before #five #just #our #russians

That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it. ↗

— Curtis LeMay

#destroyed #doing #elbows #era #even

I would like to raise my glass to friendship between Russia and the United States. ↗

— Richard Lugar

#friendship #glass #i #like #raise