Vladimir Quotes

The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Then why do they come?"
Buonarroti shrugged his shoulders.
"Because things are in such a bad way in their homeland, they're ready to flee into a black hole in space, to a concentration camp, to the Sargasso Sea of international criminal brigands."
"Between the devil and the deep blue sea," said the new consul, demonstrating his knowledge of international idioms. ~ Vladimir Lorchenkov

When we are youths in the Dominican, we pick up bats and balls because baseball is part of what we grow up with. The fun feeling you get playing keeps your head up when you encounter difficult times. ~ Vladimir Guerrero

Philosophy is the invention of the rich. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I appeal to parents: never, never say, "Hurry up," to a child. (62) ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Putin uses energy to hold our allies hostage. If energy is going to be used as a weapon, I say America must have the largest arsenal. ~ Rick Perry

No man can bring about the perfect murder; chance, however, can do it. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Terrorists are always a threat to someone. If we'll be scared of them, it means they have won. ~ Vladimir Putin

Every great writer is a great deceiver ~ Vladimir Nabokov

It is desirable that the inmate should not have at all, or if he does, should immediately himself suppress nocturnal dreams whose content might be incompatible with the condition and status of the prisoner, such as: resplendent landscapes, outings with friends, family dinners, as well as sexual intercourse with persons who in real life and in the waking state would not suffer said individual to come near, which individual will therefore be considered by the law to be guilty of rape. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

What a waste that we lost Mussolini. He is a first-rate man who would have led our party to power in Italy. [Addressing to a delegation of Italian socialists in Moscow after Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922] ~ Vladimir Lenin

Any minority's right to be different must be respected, but the right of the majority must not be questioned. Without the values at the core of Christianity and other world religions, without moral norms that have been shaped over millennia, people will inevitably lose their human dignity. ~ Vladimir Putin

The elms and the poplars were turning their ruffled backs to a sudden onslaught of wind, and a black thunderhead loomed above Ramsdale's white church tower when I looked around me for the last time. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I read papers, try to watch news programs on television, but, as a rule, recorded. During the day I have no time for that, so I watch something taped. As for the newspapers, I try to get through them every day. Additionally, of course, I look through news bulletins. ~ Vladimir Putin

By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

My family despised Faberge objects as emblems of grotesque garishness. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

In a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

A bowling ball rolled through his head, diagonally from nape to temple; it paused and started back. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I think it's fine when the mayor of the biggest city in Russia consults the president. ~ Vladimir Putin

If his Russian was music, his English was murder. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I think she always nursed a small mad hope. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Every cook must learn to rule the State. ~ Vladimir Lenin

President Obama is in China. Also in China is evil Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. They're both in China at the same time. It's like running into your ex-girlfriend on vacation. ~ David Letterman

All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake "public opinion" for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. ~ Vladimir Lenin

I had always thought that wringing one's hands was a fictional gesture - the obscure outcome, perhaps, of some medieval ritual; but as I took to the woods, for a spell of despair and desperate meditation, this was the gesture ("look, Lord, at these chains!") that would have come nearest to the mute expression of my mood. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners. ~ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

You all know that even when women have full rights, they still remain fatally downtrodden because all housework is left to them. In most cases housework is the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do. It is exceptionally petty and does not include anything that would in any way promote the development of the woman. ~ Vladimir Lenin

The attitude of the American to the dollar contains poetry. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

The Jewish bourgeoisie are our enemies, not as Jews but as bourgeoisie. The Jewish worker is our brother. ~ Vladimir Lenin

From early childhood his mother had taught him that to discuss in public a profound emotional experience-which, in the open air, immediately evanesces and fades, and, oddly, becomes similar to an analogous experience of one's interlocutor-was not only vulgar, but also a sin against sentiment. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Trust is good, but control is better. ~ Vladimir Lenin

Our society, including the liberals, must understand that there must be order. ~ Vladimir Putin

Why was the meeting between the Americans and the Russians so tensed?
Because nobody knows what Vladimir Put In Barbara's Bush!
From 'Walk On By II ~ Stephan Attia

Nymphets do not occur in polar regions. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

On a Parisienne's Bookshelf
THERE ARE MANY BOOKS ON A PARISIENNE'S BOOKSHELF:

The books you so often claim you've read that you actually believe you have.
The books you read in school from which you remember only the main character's name.
The art books your parents give you each Christmas so you can get some "culture".
The art books that you bought yourself and which you really love.
The books that you've been promising yourself you'll read next summer … for the past ten years.
The books you bought only because you liked the title.
The books that you think makes you cool.
The books you read over and over again, and that evolve along with your life.
The books that remind you of someone you loved.
The books you keep for your children, just in case you ever have any.
The books whose first ten pages you've read so many times you know them by heart.
The books you own simply because you must and, taken together, form intangible proof that you are well read.
AND THEN THERE ARE THE BOOKS YOU HAVE READ, LOVED, AND WHICH ARE A PART OF YOUR IDENTITY:

The Stranger, Albert Camus
The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq
Belle du Seigneur, Albert Cohen
Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
L'Écume des jours, Boris Vian
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire
Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand C ~ Caroline De Maigret

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Look at this tangle of thorns. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

But nobody yet had been able to dig down to what was most captivating about her: this was the mysterious ability of her soul to apprehend in life only that which had once attracted and tormented her in childhood, the time when the soul's instinct is infallible; to seek out the amusing and the touching: to feel constantly an intolerable, tender pity for the creature whose life is helpless and unhappy; to feel across hundreds of miles that somewhere in Sicily a thin-legged little donkey with a shaggy belly is being brutally beaten. Whenever she did come across a creature that was being hurt, she experienced a kind of legendary eclipse - when inexplicable night comes down and ash flies and blood appears on the walls - and it seemed that if at once, at once, she did not help, did not cut short another's torture (the existence of which it was absolutely impossible to explain in a world so conducive to happiness), her heart would not stand it, and she would die. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

It is rightly said that the most difficult thing in chess is winning a won position ~ Vladimir Kramnik

We have created islands, small islands of power, but we have not built a bridge between those islands, .. The center and the territories, regional and local authorities are still competing with each other, competing for power. Those who take advantage of disorder and arbitrary rule are watching their mutually destructive fight. ~ Vladimir Putin

A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in dark banks, or flat, ethereal beaches that looked like mirages of desert islands. I did not know then (as I know perfectly well now) what to do with such things - how to get rid of them, how to transform them into something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the blessed shiver - and this inability enhanced my oppression. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

This twinned twinkle was delightful but not completely satisfying; or rather it only sharpened my appetite for other tidbits of light and shade, and I walked on in a state of raw awareness that seemed to transform the whole of my being into one big eyeball rolling in the world's socket.

Through peacocked lashes I saw the dazzling diamond reflection of the low sun on the round back of a parked automobile. To all kinds of things a vivid pictorial sense had been restored by the sponge of the thaw. Water in overlapping festoons flowed down one sloping street and turned gracefully into another. With ever so slight a note of meretricious appeal, narrow passages between buildings revealed treasures of brick and purple. I remarked for the first time the humble fluting - last echoes of grooves on the shafts of columns - ornamenting a garbage can, and I also saw the rippling upon its lid - circles diverging from a fantastically ancient center. Erect, dark-headed shapes of dead snow (left by the blades of a bulldozer last Friday) were lined up like rudimentary penguins along the curbs, above the brilliant vibration of live gutters.

I walked up, and I walked down, and I walked straight into a delicately dying sky, and finally the sequence of observed and observant things brought me, at my usual eating time, to a street so distant from my usual eating place that I decided to try a restaurant which stood on the fringe of the town. Night had fallen without sound or ce ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The only one who doesn't make mistakes is the one who doesn't do anything. ~ Vladimir Lenin

He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire. He could not even make himself stretch out his hand to switch on the light. The simple transition from intention to action seemed an unimaginable miracle. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Putin was a former KGB intelligence officer who'd been stationed in East Germany at the Dresden headquarters of the Soviet secret service. Putin has said in interviews that he dreamed as a child of becoming a spy for the communist party in foreign lands, and his time in Dresden exceeded his imagination. Not only was he living out his boyhood fantasy, he and his then-wife also enjoyed the perks of a borderline-European existence. Even in communist East Germany, the standard of living was far more comfortable than life in Russia, and the young Putins were climbing KGB social circles, making influential connections, networking a power base.

The present was bright, and the future looked downright luminous.

Then, the Berlin wall fell, and down with it crashed Putin's world. A few days after the fall, a group of East German protestors gathered at the door of the secret service headquarters building. Putin, fearing the headquarters would be overrun, dialed up a Red Army tank unit stationed nearby to ask for protection. A voice on the other end of the line told him the unit could not do anything without orders from Moscow. And, "Moscow is silent," the man told Putin.

Putin's boyhood dream was dissolving before his eyes, and his country was impotent or unwilling to stop it. Putin despised his government's weakness in the face of threat. It taught him a lesson that would inform his own rule: Power is easily lost when those in power allow it to be tak ~ Matt Szajer

Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader's heart. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Faith receives. Love gives.
One must not receive without faith. One must not give without love.
Therefore, in order to receive, we believe, and in order to give truly, we love.
But if one gives without love, he does not benefit from such giving. ~ Vladimir Aleksandrovich Antonov

As a child I perceived violence as a sort of natural law. In the totalitarian Soviet Union, oppression held everything together. It was the sinister energy of our country. ~ Vladimir Sorokin

Democracy means the power of the people and the possibility of influencing the governing parties. Russia had had enough experience with a one-party-system - we will not go back there. ~ Vladimir Putin

There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. ~ Vladimir Putin

As to the rest, I am no more guilty of imitating 'real life' than'real life' is responsible for plagiarizing me. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The one who has not conquered the passions cannot enter the chaste and pure region of the heart. ~ Vladimir Aleksandrovich Antonov

I am not trying to say that I am poor and that I don't like beautiful things. But I don't like luxury for luxury sake or in the sense of showing off luxury. ~ Vladimir Potanin

The Soviet Union attempted to export communism to the entire world. We know what came of that. Now the West is trying to export democracy, including to regions where there is no traditional foundation for it. That cannot end well. ~ Vladimir Yakunin

The worst madman is the one who fails to consider the possibility of somebody else being mad too. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Stirless, I stand at the window, and in the black bowl of the sky glows like a golden drop of honey the mellow moon ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Paraphrasing Vladimir Zatsiorsky, the idea is to train as heavy as possible and as often as possible while staying as fresh as possible. ~ Matt Perryman

Do not be awed by giant predecessors. Be ill-tempered with their renown. Point out flaws. Frighten interviewers from Time. Appear in Playboy. Sell to the movies. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Time means succession, and succession, change: Hence timelessness is bound to disarrange Schedules of sentiment. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The fire you rubbed left its brand on the most vulnerable, most vicious and tender point of my body. Now I have to pay for your rasping the red rash too strongly, too soon, as charred wood has to pay for burning. When I remain without your caresses, I lose all control of my nerves, nothing exists any more than the ecstasy of friction, the abiding effect of your sting, of your delicious poison. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Suddenly, as Avis clung to her father's neck and ear while, with a casual arm, the man enveloped his lumpy and large offspring, I saw Lolita's smile lose all its light and become a frozen little shadow of itself, and the fruit knife slipped off the table and struck her with its silver handle a freak blow on the ankle which made her gasp, and crouch head forward, and then, jumping on one leg, her face awful with the preparatory grimace which children hold till the tears gush, she was gone - to be followed at once and consoled in the kitchen by Avis who had such a wonderful fat pink dad and a small chubby brother, and a brand-new baby sister, and a home, and two grinning dogs, and Lolita had nothing. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Coordinating there Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The revolution does not need historians. ~ Vladimir Lenin

Otar, her lover, said that when you walked behind her, and she knew you were walking behind her, the swing and play of those slim haunches was something intensely artistic, something Arab girls were taught in special schools by special Parisian panders who were afterwards strangled. Her ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will. ~ Vladimir Lenin

Terrorism has no nationality or religion. ~ Vladimir Putin

He could swear he did not look back, could not - by any optical chance, or in any prism - have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture - which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never - consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of socialism, the enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies! ~ Vladimir Lenin

Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of "advanced" countries. And this "booty" is shared between two or ~ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Today our unsophisticated cameras record in their own way our hastily assembled and painted world. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The muse of invention handed me a rifle and I shot a white bear who sat down and said: Ah. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Those Eggheadsareterrible Philistines. A realgood head is not oval but round. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The satisfaction of a special Pninian craving. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

We must force the government to stop the bird migration. We must shoot all birds, field all our men and troops ... and force migratory birds to stay where they are. ~ Vladimir Zhirinovsky

Perfect definition of atheist dogma. Your mind has been subjected to subtle mental conditioning year after year. Now the atheist lie has become the truth to you. A lie that can be blown away with the real truth. It just takes time to unwind the atheist mental conditioning. The truth is out there. Outside of atheist dogma lies the truth! ~ Vladimir Lenin

ESTRAGON: In the meantime let us try and converse calmly, since we are incapable of keeping silent.
VLADIMIR: You're right, we're inexhaustible.
ESTRAGON: It's so we won't think.
VLADIMIR: We have that excuse.
ESTRAGON: It's so we won't hear.
VLADIMIR: We have our reasons.
ESTRAGON: All the dead voices. ~ Samuel Beckett

Let the "socialist" snivellers croak, let the bourgeoisie rage and fume, but only people who shut their eyes so as not to see, and stuff their ears so as not to hear, can fail to notice that all over the world the birth pangs of the old, capitalist society, which is pregnant with socialism, have begun. ~ Vladimir Lenin

... for systems belonging to the singular part of the stability boundary a small change of the parameters is more likely to send the system into the unstable region than into the stable region. This is a manifestation of a general principle stating that all good things (e.g. stability) are more fragile than bad things. It seems that in good situations a number of requirements must hold simultaneously, while to call a situation bad even one failure suffices. ~ Vladimir I. Arnold

and he, Hugh Person....began to undress her in the motels of his mind ~ Vladimir Nabokov

In this respect I suppose I'm the total opposite of Garry. With his very emotive body language at the board he shows and displays all his emotions. I don't. ~ Vladimir Kramnik

Everyone must hoe his plot daily ... ~ Vladimir Putin

Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I've lost some weight. I am on that new Obama diet. Every day I let Vladimir Putin eat my lunch. ~ Jay Leno

Russia - having sat across the table from Vladimir Putin, it's pretty clear when you meet him that he has an almost limitless ambition for power. And he's been very good at acquiring it - political power, economic power, military power, territorial power. ~ Carly Fiorina

As commander in chief, I will not speak to Vladimir Putin until we've set up that no-fly zone; until we've gathered our Sunni-Arab allies and begun to deny ISIS territory; until I've called the supreme leader of Iran and told him new deal - new deal. We the United States of America are going to cut off the money flow, which we can do; which we don't need anyone's permission or collaboration to do. ~ Carly Fiorina

Speaking of novels,' I said, 'you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust's rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more, impossibly rude hostesses, please let me speak, and even ruder guests, mechanical Dostoevskian rows and Tolstoian nuances of snobbishness repeated and expanded to an unsufferable length, adorable seascapes, melting avenues, no, do not interrupt me, light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of metaphors, described - by Cocteau, I think - as "a mirage of suspended gardens," and, I have not yet finished, an absurd, rubber-and-wire romance between a blond young blackguard (the fictitious Marcel), and an improbable jeune fille who has a pasted-on bosom, Vronski's (and Lyovin's) thick neck, and a cupid's buttocks for cheeks; but - and now let me finish sweetly - we were wrong, Sybil, we were wrong in denying our little beau ténébreux the capacity of evoking "human interest": it is there, it is there - maybe a rather eighteenth-centuryish, or even seventeenth-centuryish, brand, but it is there. Please, dip or redip, spider, into this book [offering it], you will find a pretty marker in it bought in France, I want John to keep it. Au revoir, Sybil, I must go now. I think my telephone is ringing. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I have to say that oil and gas revenues make up a large part of the Russian budget revenue. This is a serious component for us in addressing economic development, budget funding for our development programmes and, of course, and meeting of our social commitments to our citizens. ~ Vladimir Putin

Let us be frank: provoking military-political instability and other regional conflicts is also a convenient way of deflecting people's attention from mounting social and economic problems. Regrettably, further attempts of this kind cannot be ruled out. ~ Vladimir Putin

The red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher, ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Being mad, he failed to take into account the scheming of irresponsible politicians. Being mad, he believed that other governments would act in accordance with the principles of mercy and common sense. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

In capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority. ~ Vladimir Lenin

The whole struggle of our Party (and of the working class movement in Europe generally) must be directed against opportunism. The latter is not a current of opinion, not a tendency; it (opportunism) has now become the organised tool of the bourgeoisie within the working class movement. ~ Vladimir Lenin

Protest actions and propaganda are two slightly different things. ~ Vladimir Putin

Failure to recognize one's own absolute significance is equivalent to a denial of human worth; this is a basic error and the origin of all unbelief. If one is so faint-hearted that he is powerless even to believe in himself, how can he believe in anything else? The basic falsehood and evil of egoism lie not in this absolute self-consciousness and self-evaluation of the subject, but in the fact that, ascribing to himself in all justice an absolute significance, he unjustly refuses to others this same significance. Recognizing himself as a centre of life (which as a matter of fact he is), he relegates others to the circumference of his own being and leaves them only an external and relative value. ~ Vladimir S. Soloviev

To picture world history as advancing smoothly and steadily without sometimes taking gigantic strides backward is undialectical, unscientific and theoretically wrong. ~ Vladimir Lenin

The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field's real problems. ~ Vladimir L. Voeikov

He was a noisy robust little man with a gleam of real talent concealed in the messy obscurity of his verse. But because he did his best to shock people with his monstrous mass of otiose words (he was the inventor of the "submental grunt" as he called it), his main output seems now so nugatory, so false, so old-fashioned (super-modern things have a queer knack of dating much faster than others) that his true value is only remembered by a few scholars who admire the magnificent translations of English poems made by him at the very outset of his literary career, - ~ Vladimir Nabokov

They were contemplating moving into another house or, more exactly, loudly saying to each other, so as to be overheard by anyone who might be listening, that they were contemplating moving, when all at once the fiend was gone, as happens with the moskovett, that bitter blast, that colossus of cold air that blows on our eastern shores throughout March, and then one morning you hear the birds, and the flags hang flaccid, and the outlines of the world are again in place. ~ Vladimir Nabokov