Rudite

“Šis likums ir vecs un patiess: pasaki man, ar ko tu lielies, un es pateikšu, kā tev trūkst. Mūždien viens un tas pats: nekompetentais vienmēr uzdodas par ekspertu, nežēlīgais par žēlsirdīgo, grēcinieks par svēto, augļotājs par labdari, zemisks nelietis par patriotu, augstprātīgais par pazemīgo, vulgārais par eleganto un muļķis par intelektuāli.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“...that human hunger birthed the Civ'lize, but human hunger killed it too.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“There was just one problem for Putin: Russia wasn’t a superpower anymore. Despite having a nuclear arsenal second only to our own, Russia lacked the vast network of alliances and bases that allowed the United States to project its military power across the globe. Russia’s economy remained smaller than those of Italy, Canada, and Brazil, dependent almost entirely on oil, gas, mineral, and arms exports. Moscow’s high-end shopping districts testified to the country’s transformation from a creaky state-run economy to one with a growing number of billionaires, but the pinched lives of ordinary Russians spoke to how little of this new wealth trickled down. According to various international indicators, the levels of Russian corruption and inequality rivaled those in parts of the developing world, and its male life expectancy in 2009 was lower than that of Bangladesh. Few, if any, young Africans, Asians, or Latin Americans looked to Russia for inspiration in the fight to reform their societies, or felt their imaginations stirred by Russian movies or music, or dreamed of studying there, much less immigrating. Shorn of its ideological underpinnings, the once-shiny promise of workers uniting to throw off their chains, Putin’s Russia came off as insular and suspicious of outsiders—to be feared, perhaps, but not emulated.”
― Barack Obama, A Promised Land