Oliver Brown

“And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“1832 as the first article of the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire (the first volume of the Digest that listed all laws still in effect): ‘The Emperor of all the Russians is a sovereign with autocratic and unlimited powers. To obey the commands not merely from fear but according to the dictates of one’s conscience is ordained by God himself.’ In short, the emperor’s powers were boundless and in theory the tsar could do as he wished because he alone was answerable to God. The tsar set policy, he established the laws of the land, and he was responsible for their enactment. By”
― Abraham Ascher, Russia: A Short History

“Thus it is that no cruelty whatsoever passes by without impact. Thus it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Marx wrote that 'History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.' This was witty but far from true. History is never repeated, but it borrows, steals, echoes and commandeers the past to create a hybrid, something unique out of the ingredients of past and present.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs, 1613-1918