#russian

I don't think Estonians ever really hated Russians. It was more, 'Leave us alone.' We can't change what is past. We can't blame them for what their parents have done. We never hated them. They didn't destroy us that bad. ↗

— Carmen Kass

#bad #blame #change #destroy #done

We should note that this latter type of shift was successfully amplified to a considerable extent by Russian physicists using the intense light of a ruby laser whose wavelength is close to that of a transition of the potassium atom. ↗

— Alfred Kastler

#atom #close #considerable #extent #intense

Courage: Great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children's children, pure on their tongues, and free. ↗

— Anna Akhmatova

#courage #fit #free #great #our

My boyfriend and I just got a projector, so we've been screening movies on the roof and projecting them against the wall next door. The last one we did, the theme was, 'The Russians are coming.' So we screened 'Red Dawn' and 'Top Gun.' ↗

— Olivia Thirlby

#been #boyfriend #coming #dawn #did

For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say! ↗

— Wilhelm Reich

#dictatorship #emotional-plague #hitler #laval #liberty

One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms. ↗

— Mirra Ginsburg

#realism #russian-author #russian-literature #writers #writing

Margarita was never short of money. She could buy whatever she liked. Her husband had plenty of interesting friends. Margarita never had to cook. Margarita knew nothing of the horrors of living in a shared flat. In short... was she happy? Not for a moment. ↗

— Mikhail Bulgakov

#friends #happiness #husband #inspirational #life

Just five years before that the Russians were our allies. ↗

— Martin Landau

#before #five #just #our #russians

Don't you forget what's divine in the Russian soul and that's resignation. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#forget #resignation #russian #soul #you

Women and children were slaughtered by the Taliban. You are going to sit down and negotiate with these folks? They never lived up to an agreement. The Pakistanis tried in '08, the Russians tried it when they were there. George Bush tried it in '05. It has never worked. ↗

— Mike Rogers

#bush #children #down #folks #george