Aleksandr Lyapunov Quotes

A man can safely sacrifice a great deal as long as he clings to the essential. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Vadim swallowed, felt his throat too tight to move, then, still staring at the bottle, smelling the desert and Dan, and himself, his hand reached to his side, opened the holster of the pistol. Took out the mag, took the bullet from the chamber, clicked the mag in place again, rolled the bullet between his fingers.
He looked at Dan, sideways, saw the man stare at him, all eyes, dark eyes, and the way the pale desert moon made his face a place of shadows.
He reached for Dan's hand, opened the fingers and placed the bullet into the palm.
"This is the bullet you'll use to kill me if I walk away again." Because if I walk away again, I'll be in so much pain I'm better off dead anyway. ~ Aleksandr Voinov

We never know beforehand how new posts or new work will change us. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Take me on R&R, aye? Back to where we were before, or a similar place. Sea, sky, sun, and sex 24/7. Deal?' ... 'Make that 12/7 - getting old. ~ Aleksandr Voinov

A fear conquered is a fear harnessed.
-Wysteria Morningstar ~ J. Aleksandr Wootton

The next war ... may well bury Western civilization forever. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"There is only one thing I want to be part of. You." ~ Aleksandr Voinov

I like men with weaknesses, his father had said. I can buy them. Men without weaknesses I have to kill. ~ Aleksandr Voinov

More weapons hidden on his body than hallelujah-singing angels, dangling from a Christmas tree. ~ Aleksandr Voinov

At the present time it is widely accepted among lawyers that law is higher than morality - law is something which is shaped and developed, whereas morality is something inchoate and amorphous. This is not the case. The opposite is true: morality is higher than law! Law is our human attempt to embody in rules a part of that moral sphere which is above us. We try to understand this morality, bring it down to earth, and present it in the form of law. Sometimes we are more successful, sometimes less. Sometimes we have a mere caricature of morality, but morality is always higher than law. This view must never be abandoned. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Children write essays in school about the unhappy, tragic, doomed life of Anna Karenina. But was Anna really unhappy? She chose passion and she paid for her passion - that's happiness! She was a free, proud human being. But what if during peacetime a lot of greatcoats and peaked caps burst into the house where you were born and live, and ordered the whole family to leave house and town in twenty-four hours, with only what your feeble hands can carry?... You open your doors, call in the passers-by from the streets and ask them to buy things from you, or to throw you a few pennies to buy bread with... With ribbon in her hair, your daughter sits down at the piano for the last time to play Mozart. But she bursts into tears and runs away. So why should I read Anna Karenina again? Maybe it's enough - what I've experienced. Where can people read about us? Us? Only in a hundred years?
"They deported all members of the nobility from Leningrad. (There were a hundred thousand of them, I suppose. But did we pay much attention? What kind of wretched little ex-nobles were they, the ones who remained? Old people and children, the helpless ones.) We knew this, we looked on and did nothing. You see, we weren't the victims."
"You bought their pianos?"
"We may even have bought their pianos. Yes, of course we bought them."
Oleg could now see that this woman was not yet even fifty. Yet anyone walking past her would have said she was an old woman. A lock of smooth old woman's ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

And he needed to know, hat to..why? Because hurt ran as deep as blood and lust, but nothing ever reached as far down as love. Battered, broken, full of anger, but he'd been through too much to give up on it. Not yet. (Dan) ~ Aleksandr Voinov

If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: 'It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.'

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If you live in a graveyard, you can't weep for everyone. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Gulag Archipelago, 'he informed an incredulous world that the blood-maddened Jewish terrorists had murdered sixty-six million victims in Russia from 1918 to 1957! Solzhenitsyn cited Cheka Order No. 10, issued on January 8, 1921: 'To intensify the repression of the bourgeoisie.' ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I wanted to live the inner life of every man I saw, look at the world through his eyes. ~ Aleksandr Kuprin

In all probability an outburst of desperation in the midst of general submissiveness will always help. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Communists have for decades loudly proclaimed their goal of destroying the bourgeois world, while the West merely smiled at what seemed to be an extravagant joke. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Even the most rational approach to ethics is defenseless if there isn't the will to do what is right. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

He could barely stand, the Captain, but he kept on going. Shukhov had an old horse like that at home once. He took good care of that old horse, but he worked himself to death. And then they skinned the hide off him. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You really do love him, don't you?" she said quietly.
Vadim blinked, then looked to the side, without seeing colours and patterns, but it helped him find words. Speaking about love without cliché, without borrowing somebody else's well-worn words that were too comfortable. "Dan changed me in ways that stripped away the man I wanted to be, and the man I was made to be, and the man I was expected to be. He skinned me alive, and left only…..somebody who…." He breathed but barely. "…can live and die now, like a human being, not an automation, not somebody else's creation. Dan took my fear of death. I can't die now. I know I'm immortal."

"Immortal?" she said quietly, sitting still. "Your soul? Your being?"

"I don't believe there's anything like a soul. But I believe most people are asleep. They aren't even aware what they are, or that they are alive. And we are all scared to die, so when it happens we scream for our mothers and clutch our guts because we're scared. I'm not. I'm not afraid of death. The only thing I'm afraid of is losing Dan." But if that happens, he thought, Dan might just keep the promise and kill him on the way out. ~ Aleksandr Voinov

... History sometimes does know revenge, a sort of voluptuous and delayed justice, but chooses strange forms for it and unexpected executors of its will. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Tiger and mountain lion. Fuck you. Fuck you for getting me out. You should have shot me. But you didn't have the guts to do it. Too weak. You just didn't care enough. You waited two years, and then you fucking stopped caring and tore out my fucking heart. Come on. Promises, Dan. Keep them. Cut it out. If you're a man. ~ Aleksandr Voinov

So let the reader who expects this book to be a political exposé slam its covers shut right now.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Socrates taught us: Know thyself!

Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren't. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Patriotism means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation, which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins, and penitence for them. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

An evil man threw tobacco in the macaque-rhesus eyes.' Oleg was struck dumb. Up to then he had been strolling along smiling with knowing condescension, but now he felt like yelling and roaring across the whole zoo, as though the tobacco had been thrown into his own eyes. 'Why?' Thrown into its eyes, just like that! 'Why? It's senseless! Why?' - Kostoglotov ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Oleg had learned a lesson. This was his reward for not hurrying. The lesson was - never rush on without looking around first. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When the whole discussion of "developing a national idea" hastily began in post-Soviet Russia, I tried to pour cold water on it with the objection that, after all the devastating losses we had experienced, it would be quite sufficient to have just one task: the preservation of a dying people. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Knighthood. Was he even worthy? Just a little while ago, he'd have answered yes without a doubt, but now, facing the cross and his own desires, he wasn't so sure. Courage, loyalty, obedience, faith. If even a man like Ulric could act against those virtues, then they were not something one possessed, but something to be constantly guarded and reclaimed. ~ Aleksandr Voinov

Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art-and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, oversimplified explanations. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If we look far into the future, one can see a time in the 21st century when both Europe and the USA will be in dire need of Russia as an ally. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We have ourselves to save. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Finally, he gave up trying to quiet her and lit a cigarette, the last resort of a man who finds himself in an intolerably stupid position. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

As long as you're not in love with the man, then why feel guilty because you're having fun? Besides, I've been thinking...
if you did fall in love with someone else there would be pretty little I could do." He suddenly chuckled, "except for ripping your guts out, cutting your balls off and stuffing them down your throat, of course."
(Dan) ~ Aleksandr Voinov

A tub was brought in to melt snow for mortar. They heard somebody saying it was twelve o'clock already.
"It's sure to be twelve," Shukhov announced. "The sun's over the top already."
"If it is," the captain retorted, "it's one o'clock, not twelve."
"How do you make that out?" Shukhov asked in surprise. "The old folk say the sun is highest at dinnertime."
"Maybe it was in their day!" the captain snapped back. "Since then it's been decreed that the sun is highest at one o'clock."
"Who decreed that?"
"The Soviet government."
The captain took off with the handbarrow, but Shukhov wasn't going to argue anyway. As if the sun would obey their decrees! ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In order for men to do great evil, they must first believe they are doing good. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Rub your eyes and purify your heart-and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it might be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are printed in their memory! ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The maximalist dreamers of this epoch, the Left Bolshevik (Vpered) group led by the philosopher of proletarian culture, Aleksandr Bogdanov, were effectively defeated by the hardheaded "centrist" Leninists by 1912. ~ Michael David-Fox

The great risk of living is that we might not survive it. ~ J. Aleksandr Wootton

First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You can't know everything in the world. Whatever happens you'll die a fool. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn