translators-from-russia

"Наука в развращённом человеке есть лютое оружие делать зло. Просвещение возвышает одну добродетельную душу."

"Волшебный край! там в стары годы, Сатиры смелый властелин, Блистал Фонвизин, друг свободы."

"Вот злонравия достойные плоды!"

"Да чего ты у меня просить хочешь. Если только, мой батюшка, не денег, то я всем ссудить тебя могу. Ты знаешь, каковы ныне деньги: ими никто даром не ссужает, а для них ни в чем не отказывают."

"Не хочу учиться, хочу жениться."

"Начинаются чины — перестаёт искренность."

"“Your question falls under the umbrella of a pseudoscience called xenology. Xenology is an unnatural mixture of science fiction and formal logic. At its core is a flawed assumption—that an alien race would be psychologically human.”"

"He didn’t know the driver, a new guy, some pimply beaked kid, one of the thousands who had recently flocked to Harmont looking for hair-raising adventures, untold riches, international fame, or some special religion; they came in droves but ended up as taxi drivers, waiters, construction workers, and bouncers in brothels—yearning, untalented, tormented by nebulous desires, angry at the whole world, horribly disappointed, and convinced that here, too, they’d been cheated."

"That’s the Zone for you: come back with swag, a miracle; come back alive, success; come back with a patrol bullet in your ass, good luck; and everything else—that’s fate."

"“Look into my soul, I know—everything you need is in there. It has to be. Because I’ve never sold my soul to anyone! It’s mine, it’s human! Figure out yourself what I want—because I know it can’t be bad! The hell with it all, I just can’t think of a thing other than those words of his—HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE, AND LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN!”"

"Sometimes I ask myself, Why the hell are we always in such a whirl? For the money? But why in the world do we need money, if all we ever do is keep working?"

"We usually proceed from a trivial definition: intelligence is the attribute of man that separates his activity from that of the animals. It’s a kind of attempt to distinguish the master from the dog, who seems to understand everything but can’t speak. However, this trivial definition does lead to wittier ones. They are based on depressing observations of the aforementioned human activity. For example: intelligence is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural acts."

"Intelligence is the ability to harness the powers of the surrounding world without destroying the said world."

"And you know, Richard, I’m a physicist and therefore a skeptic."

"Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he felt a wave of despair. Everything was useless. Everything was pointless. My God, he thought, we can’t to do a thing! We can’t stop it, we can’t slow it down! No force in the world could contain this blight, he thought in horror. It’s not because we do bad work. And it’s not because they are more clever and cunning than we are. The world is just like that. Man is like that. If it wasn’t the Visit, it would have been something else. Pigs can always find mud."

"A man needs money in order to never think about it…"

"I wonder why we liked being praised. There’s no money in it. Fame? How famous could we get? He became famous: now he’s known to three."

"The problem is we don’t notice the years pass, he thought. Screw the years—we don’t notice things change. We know that things change, we’ve been told since childhood that things change, we’ve witnessed things change ourselves many a time, and yet we’re still utterly incapable of noticing the moment that change comes—or we search for change in all the wrong places."

"There’s a need to understand, but that doesn’t require knowledge. The God hypothesis, for example, allows you to have an unparalleled understanding of absolutely everything while knowing absolutely nothing…Give a man a highly simplified model of the world and interpret every event on the basis of this simple model. This approach requires no knowledge. A few rote formulas, plus some so-called intuition, some so-called practical acumen, and some so-called common sense."

"Scared, the eggheads. And maybe that’s how it should be. They should be even more scared than the rest of us ordinary folks put together. Because we merely don’t understand a thing, but they at least understand how much they don’t understand. They gaze into this bottomless pit and know that they will inevitably have to climb down—their hearts are racing, but they’ll have to do it—except they don’t know how or what awaits them at the bottom or, most important, whether they’ll be able to get back out."

"In some sense, we’re all cavemen—we can’t imagine anything more frightening than a ghost or a vampire. But the violation of the principle of causality—that’s actually much scarier than a whole herd of ghosts…"

"When Russians were growing up in Soviet times, they thought Chukovsky’s story about the cockroach ruling over all the other animals was nonsense, but now in adulthood, they recognize that the Soviet children’s writer was really a prophet."

"The last refuge of a scoundrel is patriotism says Tolstoy in The Reading Circle Not all patriotism of course Patriotism is only acceptable after it has passed through the purifying fire of denial Patriotism is not given to a person but entrusted to him and must be purified of all the filth of selfishness and self absorption that clings to it With a little pressure on the accelerator one could say that patriotism must be endured otherwise it is worthless Especially Russian patriotism."

"The Proto-Indo-European term for 'horse' shows only that horses were known (nobody doubts this); it does not mean that horses were already domesticated."

"From our point of view there was no migration as such. . . .There was a gradual spread from one center in all directions. In the course of such a spread the groups of dialects and specific isoglosses that had developed were maintained. . . .The biological situation among the speakers of modern Indo-European languages can only be explained through a transfer of languages like a baton, as it were, in a relay race, but not by several thousand miles' migration of the tribes themselves. (152-153)."

"This thesis will receive—and has already received—cheers from dilettantes. Dilettantes desperately need one thing: the proof that the population of the Armenian Plateau spoke Armenian ever since the Palaeolithic period, if possible."

"The reason why Absurdists plays take place in No Man's Land with only two characters in primarily financial."

"Leviathan learning to overcome time"

"The century has started with the crime of the century."

"The knack of living — how skilfully it kills!"

""Women don't survive here," a woman of eighty said."

"Polluters of void."

"...nothing else left but to watch eternity breaking up into human splinters."

"...letters of a burning book dance in flame not every time and not every time literally."

"What shall we do after we learn what we'll do: that is the question."

"When you kill wolves people die."

"Europe is shrinking, but America is broadening."

"Once a century the world is divided into before and after."

"'Sorry, we gave you a wrong life,' they said not too apologetically. 'Will you begin anew?'"

"Caliban fights the Taliban"

"The bigger the house, the smaller the occupants."

"there is a hauntedness to Mandelstam’s imagery that I wanted to capture."

"he was totally unconcerned about winning a place for himself in the world of letters. He was much too busy. What with books, people, conversation, the events of the day, and even the lowly business of running to the shop for bread or kerosene, his time was fully occupied...For all my light-headedness, even I was astonished at his improvidence. And the times were not propitious."

"I think the first discovery I made for myself which I didn't necessarily share with my family or my friends, but came upon myself, was Russian literature. I've always felt very much enthralled to writers like Dostoevsky, especially, and Chekhov. In later years, modern Russian poets like Pasternak and Mandelstam and Akhmatova have meant a great deal to me. Poetry more than prose."

"I never ceased to believe in M.'s and Akhmatova's poetry. In our depersonalized world where everything human was silenced, only the poet preserved his "self" and a voice which can still be heard even now."

"love can be manifested in a situation in which a man may love his country and suffer for it-such as a poet like Mandelstam. Even if that person perishes, the tyrant can't touch him. And therefore, what had to be touched by those people behind the glass is that idea. And that's stronger, it is ultimately stronger than the victims who are lying around."

"The essence of nineteenth century cognitive activity is projection."

"The French Revolution ended when the spirit of Classical vengeance abandoned it. The Revolution had reduced the priesthood to ashes, destroyed social determinism, and brought the secularization of Europe to its ultimate conclusion. It was then washed up on the shore of the nineteenth century as an already unfathomable thing, not as a Gorgon's head, but as a fascicle of seaweed. Out of the union of mind and the furies a mongrel was born, equally alien to the high rationalism of the Encyclopedia and to the Classical raging of the revolutionary storm-Romanticism. Nevertheless, as it developed, the nineteenth century moved much further away from its predecessor than Romanticism. The nineteenth century was the conduit of Buddhist influence in European culture."

"I found it funny that he never wrote at a table like everybody else, but always put his paper on a chair and squatted in front of it on his haunches."

"a taste for historical reincarnation and total understanding is not constant; it is a transient taste. And our century has begun under the sign of great intolerance, exclusiveness, and conscious noncomprehension of other worlds."