russia Quotes

“Our churches, known the world over for their idiosyncratic beauty, for their brightly colored spires and improbable cupolas, we raze one by one. We topple the statues of old heroes and strip their names from the streets, as if they had been figments of our imagination. Our poets we either silence, or wait patiently for them to silence themselves.”

″‘Who would have imagined,’ he said, ‘when you were sentenced to life in the Metropol all those years ago, that you had just become the luckiest man in all of Russia.‘”

“On a scale from one to ‘invade Russia in winter,’ how stupid is this plan?”

“Shall we sum up the whole history of Russia in a single phrase? It is the land of smothered opportunities.”

“The only things she had left of backhome Russia were her dress and babushka she liked to throw up into the air when she was dancing.”

“We will make a quilt to help us remember home, it will be like having the family in backhome Russia dance around us at night.”

“As it walks one way, it sings songs. As it walks the other, it tells stories. This is one of the stories the cat tells.”

“He would take pretty little imitation lemons, such as are now being shipped into Russia, handy for carrying in the pockets, and strong enough to blow a whole temple out of sight.”

Political economy told him that the laws by which the wealth of Europe had been developed, and was developing, were universal and unvarying. Socialism told him that development along these lines leads to ruin. And neither of them gave an answer, or even a hint, in reply to the question what he, Levin, and all the Russian peasants and landowners, were to do with their millions of hands and millions of acres, to make them as productive as possible for the common weal.