Non Fiction Authors From Russia

"Si nous possédions un flair moral plus développé, nous serions aussi écœurés moralement par la rapacité de ceux qui cherchent a profiter et à accaparer sans égards pour autrui, que nous le sommes par une odeur nauséabonde."

"The feeling of solidarity that is born amidst a community rests on the feeling of antagonism against those who are opposed to it. Most of the time we only adhere to a party or a group, in order to better differentiate ourselves from another."

"If the present civilisation does not acquire some stable moral fondations, its existence will hardly be more assured than that of the civilisations that have preceeded it, and which have fallen."

"If we recognize, following the materialist theories, that only the physical nature exists, and that man contains no higher essence, divine, which raises him above his animal nature, it would be a question neither of obligation, nor of moral responsibility; then the supreme good would consist for him, indeed, to satisfy his appetites and his natural inclinations, to look for pleasure and to flee from pain. In this case, there could be neither religion nor morality, since religion is precisely what raises man above vulgar reality, and morality is the very negation of selfishness."

"In reality, there is no contradiction between science and religion, whose domains are distinct, and which, far from fighting and persecuting each other, must, on the contrary, complement each other."

"The virtue preached by devout persons is the virtue of the slave who always believes themselves under the eye of the master. However, Jésus said: 'Serve God not as slaves, but as sons in the house'"

"If we accomplish a good deed, a charity in the hope of future rewards, or with a more or less admitted ulterior motive to profit from personal advantages, we are probably doing a useful thing, but which is devoid of any truly moral character."

"Men who have sacrificed their well-being, and even their lives, for the cause of truth or the public good, are, from an empirical point of view (which scorns virtue and altruism) regarded as insane or as fools; but, from a moral standpoint, they are heroes who honour humanity."

"Nothing that rests on contradictions shall succeed or last in the long run; all that involves a contradiction is fatally destined, sooner or later, to disintegrate and disappear."

"If the abandonment of religious and moral principles was to become widespread, the consequences could be become such that we would finally see crop up in the very heart of civilisation, a new and apalling barbarism capable of engulfing all the acquisitions of the past."

"What is missing to our civilisation is the soul, the spiritual unity, the basis. That is why everything in it is pretence and contrivance; and why also, in spite of the progress and marvellous improvement they have accomplished in the external realm, men have, in general, become themselves neither better nor happier. They have neglected too much the essential; their own perfecting."

"Grâce à la connaissance des lois physiques, l’homme a pu au dehors asservir la nature, mais, intérieurement, il en est resté l’esclave."

"The doctrine expounded by me is the true one, but I am not its author. I have only been, so to speak, the soil in which it has germinated and has developed itself with an extreme slowness in the course of long years. Also there has never been such a disproportion between the man and his work than in my case, and what is the saddest, is that one has to suffer because of the incapacity and the weakness of the other. A man more capable than me, possessing this doctrine, would already have stirred the world."

"There is only one thing in the world that is really valuable, it is to do good."

"It is from our lack of proper content, from our inner emptiness, that we need occupations and distractions. Otherwise we experience boredom, which is nothing else than the feeling of unease that takes hold of us when our spirit is not asorbed in the mirages of life."

"The intellectual development of man, far from having gotten men away from war, has rather, on the contrary, brought them to a more perfected refinment in the art of killing."

"Deep down, everything comes down to the following simple question: Do we really want justice and the realization in this world of higher principles? Or else do we want to serve selfish, short-sighted interests, which, when all is said and done, are also detrimental to those very same people that pursue them?"

"La réalisation de la justice est, dans l’état actuel des choses, une question de vie ou de mort pour la société et pour la civilisation elle-même."

"In life we only try to produce, to win, and enjoy the more we can; in science, to discover and invent the more we can; in religion, to dominate on the greatest number of people we can; whereas the forming of the character, the further development of the faculties of the intelligence, the refinement of the consciousness and of the heart, are considered incidental things."

"Place a spider on top of a mountain and it will only try to catch flies; alas, they are many who, in the figurative meaning, have spider's eyes."

"The well understood equity as well as interest of society demand that we work much more to prevent crimes and offenses than to punish them."

"The most sacred duty, the supreme and urgent work, is to deliver humanity from the malediction of Cain - fratricidal war."

"Nothing depicts better the poverty of human nature than to see men, placed as the leaders of nations, be preoccupied only with their own prestige and their own personal interest."

"In the actual state of social relationships, the forms of politeness are necessary as a subsitute for benevolence."

"To spend for destruction ten times more than for instruction, such is the fashion in our time; and men seriously regard themsleves as rational beings!"

"To succeed in brilliant businesses, to achieve great success, that is what the ambition and efforts of the majority of men aim for. But at the end of the day what do they get for it? Softer cushions, better meat, maybe decorations or medals - that is all. And to think that there are found serious men who consume their whole existence in the pursuit and the expectation of these trivialities."

"En s'adonnant trop exclusivement à la recherche d'un bonheur matériel, de biens éphémères, on méconnaît les vraies réalités dela vie et on laisse s'étioler et se dessécher l'esprit."

"The more gifted by nature is a man, the more is deplorable the abuse that he does by using them to shameful ends. A swindler or crook of higher condition is more blameworthy than a vulgar scoundrel; an intelligent evil-doer, having benefited from a higher education, represents a more saddening phenomenon than an unfortunate illiterate fellow having committed an offence."

"The social organization of work is the most complicated and difficult problem that humanity has ever had to solve. It being possible to realize this organization neither by violence, nor by merely external or legal measures, it requires the free participation of all to the common work, and, consequently, to a regeneration of men that brings them to overcome their selfishness and to understand their duty towards themselves and towards the community."

"It is not on the ruins of liberty that we may in the future build justice."

"My heroes are those people who want to be individuals but are being forced to be cogs again. In an Empire there are only cogs."

"Anybody trying to do anything worthwhile in Russia at the moment is moving toward the left. [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky is correct, although all the democrats condemned his thoughts from prison. Russia's Left March is a fait accompli, which also rules out any Russian Orange Revolution. There will be no splendid revolutionary breakthrough with oranges, tulips, or roses in Russia. Our revolution, if it comes, will be red, because the Communists are almost the most democratic force in the country, and because it will be bloody."

"Tragically, our most active democrats are on the Left. I cannot bring myself to vote Communist because the distance between their progressive and repressive instincts is too short, but Putin's regime is a great recruiting ground for the Left, particularly among the young."

"[It] is we who are responsible for Putin's policies ... [s]ociety has shown limitless apathy ... [a]s the Chekists have become entrenched in power, we have let them see our fear, and thereby have only intensified their urge to treat us like cattle. The KGB respects only the strong. The weak it devours. We of all people ought to know that."

"We have no philanthropists and [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky's imprisonment is a warning to others. He set up the Open Russia Foundation and financed opposition parties, environmental organisations and human rights. Vladimir Putin has said that Russia will not allow foreigners to finance our civil society, but now we have no domestic investors to do it, which is a tragedy. If we continue like this, 100 years from now there will be no civil society in Russia."

"We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial - whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit."

"The greatest compliment one can pay a master is to compare him with Capablanca."

"Don't fiddle while Byrne roams!"

"A free man - is a man who is free internally. As all other people, externally he or she depends on society. Internally he or she is independent. A society can become liberated externally - from oppression, but it can become free only when the majority of people are free internally."

"To see a man as beautiful – means to make him really beautiful. There is no cunning, no deceit; this happens every time, everyone knows that."

"A vicious teacher is just a vicious teacher, as a vicious neighbor may happen to be. But a vicious mother - means that the whole world is vicious."

"A child gets sick with a chronic disease of unhappiness not from unhappy circumstances but from unhappy people around him. Unhappy people cannot raise happy children; it’s impossible."

"Fears to look bad in front of other people, to say something wrong, to be laughed at - all those fears deprive us of half of our abilities. This is one of the main school problems. That teacher understands it, who can teach students to study without fear of the teacher, without fear of classmates, and, the most important, without fear of a subject."

"Integrity has a high psychological and philosophical value, for many people it is a highest value, it associate with health of soul. Dualism, contradiction, torments of hesitation - is something of illness, integrity is health, people strive for it instinctively."

"What is the internally free man free from? First of all - he or she is free from fear of people and life; from conventional opinion. He or she is independent from the crowd, from stereotypical thinking. He or she is able to have their own personal point of view; free from prejudices. He or she is free from envy, selfishness and from aggressive personal drives."

"A son is not a judge of his father, but the conscience of the father is in his son."

"Democratic totalitarianism and financial dictatorship exclude social revolution."

"... as far as the conquests of science are concerned, they are the foundation on which an obscurantism flourishes, with which the obscurantism of the Middle Ages pales in comparison."

"We can consider that the era we have just entered is not only post-communist but also post-democratic."

"... the masters of the global supra-society continue Hitler's work, but using the much more powerful means of contemporary science and masking their aims under the label of democracy."