Amina > Amina's Quotes

“– Правду говорить легко и приятно, – заметил арестант.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov

“One man who stopped lying could bring down a tyranny.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“There's nothing more difficult than saying goodbye to a house where you've suffered.”
― Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

“Иногда мы хотим солгать, а Язык нам не даёт. Этих людей объявляли изменниками, но в языке примечательно ошиблись — и судьи, и прокуроры, и следователи. И сами осуждённые, и весь народ, и газеты повторили и закрепили эту ошибку, невольно выдавая правду; их хотели объявить изменниками РодинЕ, но никто не говорил и не писал даже в судебных материалах иначе, как "изменники Родины".

Ты сказал! Это были не изменники ей, а её изменники. Не они, несчастные, изменили Родине, но расчётливая Родина изменила им [...]”
― Александр Солженицын, Архипелаг ГУЛАГ

“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other”
― Anton Chekhov

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For a sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“It is the curse of age, that all things are reflections of other things.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stories: All-New Tales

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.... Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“And sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in.”
― Jane Austen

“Служить бы рад, прислуживаться тошно.”
― Александр Сергеевич Грибоедов

“Intellectual freedom is essential -- freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship.”
― Andrei Sakharov

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.”
― John Steinbeck

“If I love you, what business is it of yours?”
― Johann wolfgang von Goethe

“Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.”
― William James

“The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.”
― Wole Soyinka

“I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Почему вообще вы берёте себе право решать за другого человека? Ведь это - страшное право, оно редко ведёт к добру.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Русановы любили народ - свой великий народ, и служили этому народу, и готовы были жизни отдать за народ.
Но с годами они всё больше терпеть не могли - населения. Этого строптивого, вечно уклоняющегося, упирающегося да ещё что-то требуеющего себе населения.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn