#russia

The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia. ↗

— Otto von Bismarck

#make #politics #russia #secret #treaty

All the real things in Russia are done in the villages. ↗

— Ernest Poole

#real #real things #russia #things #villages

I hope for a light grief in old age. I was born in Rome and it has returned to me. My autumn was a kind of she-wolf, And August - the month of Caesars - smiled at me. ↗

— Osip Mandel'shtam

#age

For months it seemed that a revolution was certain. But instead, slavery seems more likely now. The working class no longer has the physical resistance for a revolution, and the Entente is too strong, and Russia is too weak. ↗

— Agnes Smedley

#class #instead #likely #longer #months

I like American women. They do things sexually Russian girls never dream of doing - like showering. ↗

— Yakov Smirnoff

#american women #doing #dream #i #like

There has never been a 'war on drugs'! In our history we can only see an ongoing conflict amongst various drug users – and producers. In ancient Mexico the use of alcohol was punishable by death, while the ritualistic use of mescaline was highly worshipped. In 17th century Russia, tobacco smokers were threatened with mutilation or decapitation, alcohol was legal. In Prussia, coffee drinking was prohibited to the lower classes, the use of tobacco and alcohol was legal. ↗

— Sebastian Marincolo

#caffeine #coffee #drug-user #drugs #legalization

at one time, a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conceptions of religion, law and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed... In the old days, you see, if a man - a Frenchman, for instance- wished to get an education, he would have set to work to study the classics, the theologians, the tragedians, historians and philosophers- and you can realize all the intellectual labour involved. But nowadays he goes straight for the literature of negation, rapidly assimilates the essence of the science of negation, and thinks he's finished. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#education

Now a government is secure insofar as it has God for its foundation and His Will for its guide; but this, surely, is not a description of Liberal government. It is, in the Liberal view, the people who rule, and not God; God Himself is a "constitutional monarch" Whose authority has been totally delegated to the people, and Whose function is entirely ceremonial. The Liberal believes in God with the same rhetorical fervor with which he believes in Heaven. The government erected upon such a faith is very little different, in principle, from a government erected upon total disbelief, and whatever its present residue of stability, it is clearly pointed in the direction of Anarchy. ↗

— Seraphim Rose

#monarchy #seraphim-rose #faith

During the night two delegates of the railwaymen were arrested. The strikers immediately demanded their release, and as this was not conceded, they decided not to allow trains leave the town. At the station all the strikers with their wives and families sat down on the railway track-a sea of human beings. They were threatened with rifles salvoes. The workers bared their breast and cried, "Shoot!" A salvo was fired into the defenceless seated crowd, and 30 to 40 corpses, among them women and children, remained on the ground. On this becoming known the whole town of Kiev went to strike on the same day. The corpses of the murdered workers were raised on high by the crowd and carried round in mass demonstration. ↗

— Rosa Luxemburg

#marxism #october-revolution #rosa-luxemburg #russian-revolution #socialism

The enchanted world arising out of the dim mists of the past, into which he just stepped, quivered-and disappeared. ↗

— Ivan Turgenev

#point-of-view #russia #intelligence