Great Russian Quotes

#1. I think I tended toward the Russian training because my first teacher taught a version of Vaganova, and it was drilled into me that that was the best system, and also at the time there were a lot of great Russian stars.

Sascha Radetsky

#2. Lev Vygotsky, the great Russian psychologist, used to speak of "thinking in pure meanings." I cannot decide whether this is nonsense or profound truth - it is the sort of reef I end up on when I think about thinking.

Oliver Sacks

#3. Fuck your fucking mother!' Gesar howled, twisting the wheel round. In a moment of genuine terror only the Russian language could convey the true depths of his feelings. It made me feel proud of our great Russian culture!

Sergei Lukyanenko

#4. Courage: Great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children's children, pure on their tongues, and free.

Anna Akhmatova

#5. Sure, my uncle killed himself playing Russian Roulette. But I choose to remember him as a great Russian Roulette player.

Anthony Jeselnik

#6. On the top of the tomb, seemingly driven through the solid marble - for the structure was composed of a few vast blocks of stone - was a great iron spike or stake. On going to the back I saw, graven in great Russian letters: 'The dead travel fast.

Bram Stoker

#7. Peter the Great imagined himself as a Russian Louis XIV

Jennifer Homans

#8. The home front is always underrated by Generals in the field. And yet that is where the Great War was won and lost. The Russian, Bulgarian, Austrian and German home fronts fell to pieces before their armies collapsed.

David Lloyd George

#9. So great is the worth of Dostoevsky that to have produced him is by itself sufficient justification for the existence of the Russian people in the world: and he will bear witness for his country-men at the last judgement of the nations.

Nikolai Berdyaev

#10. For over two centuries (or so historians tell us), it was from the St. Petersburg salons that our country's culture advanced. From those great rooms overlooking the Fontanka Canal, new cuisines, fashions, and ideas all took their first tentative steps into Russian society.

Amor Towles

#11. Russian Communism is the illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great.

Clement Attlee

#12. At Oxford University, I studied languages so I could read the great novels as they were originally written. I took what in the United States would be a double major in Russian and French, but I have to admit that the pressure of getting through so many books spoiled reading for me.

Kate Beckinsale

#13. In days of doubt, in days of dreary musings on my country's fate, you alone are my comfort and support, oh great, powerful, righteous, and free Russian language!

Ivan Turgenev

#14. The unattainable was most desireable. The already attained was dull.

Eleanor Herman

#15. An enormously vast field lies between "God exists" and "there is no God." The truly wise man traverses it with great difficulty. A Russian knows one or the other of these two extremes, but is not interested in the middle ground. He usually knows nothing, or very little.

Anton Chekhov

#16. It [Bach's cello suites] is like a great diamond," said [Mischa] Maisky in a thick Russian accent, "with so many different cuts that reflect light in so many different ways.

Eric Siblin

#17. To me, he was the grand master of wine. He was a forceful Russian and a gentle person. The greats of wine all over the world have great affection and admiration for him. What a beautiful man he was and what a privilege to have been touched by him.

Margrit Mondavi

#18. Some anthems are great for sports. You've got the Russian national anthem ... 'O Canada,' how wonderful is that for hockey ... but I chose the Italian national song because at my first World Cup, I saw the Italians play four times, and they won all four times - they won the championship.

George Vecsey

#19. It was funny on '24' because I'm a Scots-Canadian, and I was working with the great Scottish actor Tony Curran, and we were both playing Russian gangsters.

Callum Keith Rennie

#20. In the account book of the Great War the page recording the Russian losses has been ripped out. The figures are unknown. Five millions, or eight? We ourselves know not.

Paul Von Hindenburg

#21. Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first.

Pankaj Mishra

#22. Slavophilism, the messianism of backwardness, has based its philosophy upon the assumption that the Russian people and their church are democratic through and through, whereas official Russia is a German bureaucracy imposed upon them by Peter the Great.

Leon Trotsky

#23. [Reviewing the New York City Telephone Directory] But it is the opinion of the present reviewer that the weakness of plot is due to the great number of characters which clutter up the pages. The Russian school is responsible for this.

Robert Benchley

#24. People were always ready to yield their
wills, to worship the hero, because they were not given a chance
for developing initiative, stability, and independence, said the great
nineteenth-century Russian sociologist Nikolai Mikhailovsky

Ernest Becker

#25. Max,' I said, looking up at him, 'I love the Russian heritage you guys are so willing to share, but I'm not so thrilled with the French.'
'What?' His brows lowered. 'We're not French.'
'Great. So the next time you feel the need to kiss me, keep your tongue out of my mouth!

Shannon Delany

#26. The great drama of Russian history has been between its state and society. Put simply, Russia has always had too much state and not enough society.

Fareed Zakaria

#27. It has been denied that any direct pressure was exerted by the Russian Government, but the point is not of great importance, for the Communist parties of all countries can be taken as carrying out Russian policy, and it is not denied that the Communist Party was the chief

George Orwell

#28. Being sick is itself a kind of ressentiment. - Against this the invalid has only one great means of cure - I call it Russian fatalism, that fatalism without rebellion with which a Russian soldier for whom the campaign has become too much at last lies down in the snow.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#29. A great deal of energy is spent daily on pushing the Russian e-commerce boom along while managing all aspects of growth and development along the way.

Maelle Gavet

#30. Peterhof (Petrodvorets). Nicknamed the "Russian Versailles," the elaborate interiors, formal gardens, and beautiful fountains of Peter the Great's summer palace live up to their moniker. This is St. Petersburg's most famous imperial residence, located in the suburbs about 40 minutes away.

Fodor's Travel Publications Inc.

#31. I had studied Russian in college. I had gotten into it first through literature and then just really found it kind of fascinating; of course, this was during the Cold War. So they were kind of the other great enemy that you grew up hearing about.

Scott Shane

#32. Potemkin suffered bitterly from having nothing left to want. For when dreams turn into reality, there is an empty spot where the dreams used to be, and Potemkin had no dreams left.

Eleanor Herman

#33. The refusal of the British and Russian peoples to accept what appeared to be inevitable defeat was the great factor in the salvage of our civilization.

George C. Marshall

#34. The feminine section of the proletarian army is of particularly great significance... the success of a revolution depends on the extent to which women take part in it.

Vladimir Lenin

#35. Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.

Paul Theroux

#36. And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune- all the same, let us never forget how good we all once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, ... perhaps better than we actually are.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#37. I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.

Anthony Marra

#38. Ralph Miliband was a socialist intellectual of great integrity. He belonged to a generation of socialists formed by the Russian revolution and the Second World War, a generation that dominated left-wing politics for almost a century.

Tariq Ali

#39. It would be easier to fight the Russian army, and it would give me great satisfaction, but I have a responsibility to my people

Aslan Maskhadov

#40. Poison Pill is a great reading. The novel ranges from Russian oligarchs to the American worlds of drug research and the equity markets, all of it in a mode of high suspense.

Scott Turow

#41. Grandma frowned and yelled something in Russian. She could have been saying, 'Open up, your best friend is here.' On the other hand, it could have been, 'America is a great country because of canned ravioli.

Laurie Halse Anderson

#42. In Western Europe people perish from the congestion and stifling closeness, but with us it is from the spaciousness ... The expanses are so great that the little man hasn't the resources to orient himself ... This is what I think about Russian suicides.

Anton Chekhov

#43. When I lived in New York, I discovered these Russian & Turkish Baths in East 10th Street. Great for a platza treatment - plus, you'll run into the world and his wife there.

Ben Elliot