Lord Vladimir Quotes & Sayings

It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as [inherently] exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord's blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal. — Vladimir Putin

[Phoebe Broome] 'Well,' she said at last. 'You've now met my father. At his worst.'
[Lord Vladimir] 'Being myself widely considered my family's most difficult member, I would not presume to comment.'
'That is ... gentlemanly of you. — Alison Sinclair

Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it's hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects - that machine, there, for instance. It's a complete ghost to me - I don't understand a thing about it and, well, it's a mystery to me, as much of a mystery as it would be to Lord Byron. — Vladimir Nabokov

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