Sovieticus Quotes & Sayings

Coloured lights splintered behind my eyes. For a few brief, blissful moments, all thought, all memory, dissolved like sugar in water. I was free. There was nothing but sweat and skin, hot harsh breath against my neck, a cock driving into me. Raw, undeserved pleasure stolen from a stranger in a dark room — Alexis Hall

There's a Spanish proverb," he said, "that's always fascinated me. "Take what you want and pay for it, says God.'" "I don't believe in God," Daniel said, "but that principle seems, to me, to have a divinity of its own; a kind of blazing purity. What could be simpler, or more crucial? You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and that you will have to pay it. — Tana French

Be the instrument playing the sound of your life's passing — Jonathan Safran Foer

Our differences are policies; our agreements, principles. — William McKinley

I got your head noddin' cuz your neck knows it's phat. — Donnie Lewis

When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness. — Jules Renard

Liberalism
it is well to recall this today
is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Seventy-plus years in the Marxist-Leninist laboratory gave rise to a new man: Homo sovieticus. Some see — Svetlana Alexievich

The biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work. — Charles Kettering

Until all students are faced by the tragedies, the contradictions and the stark questions of life, they cannot understand the need for redemption or God's redemptive action. — Reuel Howe

Sitting here, beneath this majestic oak tree under the hot afternoon sun in the middle of nowhere, the concept of time, present, and future, were all blurred. What was time if you didn't know whether you had it?
When you weren't sure what you had to live for? - Skylla Warden — Rachael Wade

Many things are lost for want of asking. — George Herbert

If the immediate postwar period had been characterized by violent attacks on the existing institutions of civil society, after 1948 the regimes [of Eastern Europe] began instead to create a new system of state-controlled schools and mass organizations which would envelop their citizens from the moment of birth. Once inside this totalitarian system, it was assumed, the citizens of of the communist states would never want or be able to leave it. They were meant to become, in the sarcastic phrasing of an old Soviet dissident, members of the species Homo sovieticus, Soviet man. Not only would Homo Sovieticus never oppose communism; he could never even conceive of opposing communism. — Anne Applebaum

SAY IT. Go ahead, stand before the mirror, look at your mouth, and say it. Blue. See how you pucker up, your lips opening with the consonants into a kiss, and then that final exhalation of vowels? Blue. The word looks like what it is, a syllable blown out into the air, and with the sound and the sight of saying it as one. — William H Gass