Today’s One-Liner (#74)
Think, when you look at people, at their recent birth, their childhood, or their imminent death—and you will love them: such frail creatures. –Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), A Voice from the Chorus
Think, when you look at people, at their recent birth, their childhood, or their imminent death—and you will love them: such frail creatures. –Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), A Voice from the Chorus
The meaning of life lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul. –Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, First Things, August/September 2024, p. 70,
The only good life is one in which there is no need for miracles. –Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope: A Memoir
There is no revolution like the Communist revolution. You simply burn all the books, kill all of the thinking people and use the poor proletariat to create a very simple benchmark to gauge social change….
[Thomas] Sowell’s habit of challenging liberal orthodoxies that are held dear by most of his fellow intellectuals and the mainstream media has led to a good deal of criticism over the decades. This book explores…
What I mostly feel in myself is my father and mother, you, Yegor, Pushkin, Gogol. A whole crowd. They all colour my perception of reality, share my destiny and go with me wherever I am…
[Soviet critics] conceded that much of what [Vasily] Grossman had written was true, but to publish the novel at such a time would be harmful to the state. Marlov or Sartakov suggested that publication might…
[Russian] writers have decried Russia’s slavery and violent past.—Alexandra Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century Reading [Leo] Tolstoy strengthened [Vasily] Grossman’s ambition to become a writer. Tolstoy’s interest in the human soul, his quest…
Countless former prisoners described how memorized verse consoled them. It preserved their past life and their continuity with it. And it was something the authorities could not take away. Once stories about prisoners reciting poetry…
“It is my duty to speak up; I will not be an accessory to the fact. If I were, my nights would be haunted by the spectre of that innocent man so far away, suffering…