The Russian Quotes

#1. When the Russian kettlebell meets an American steak, it is a beautiful thing.

Pavel Tsatsouline

#2. Always live the adventure.

Christopher J. Holcroft

#3. In effect, I was asking that if Russia mobilized against Austria, the German Government, who had been supporting the Austrian demand on Serbia, should ask Austria to consider some modification of her demands, under the threat of Russian mobilization.

Edward Grey

#4. A corporal, who had lost an eye after two years on the Russian front, ascertained before we marched that his wife, his two children, and both of his parents had been killed. He had one cigarette. He shared it with me.

Kurt Vonnegut

#5. Germany, because of the fact and the perception of a special relationship with Russia, is the only one who can influence Russian debate. Russians also believe that Germans understand them best because they've been through a big war and know what humiliation means.

Ivan Krastev

#6. I would be delighted if the United States could have a positive relationship with Russia, and I would be thrilled if the Russian people, who are so capable, had a normal country that they could chart a different future.

Hillary Clinton

#7. Much later I realized that Russian people, because of the poverty and squalor of their lives, love to amuse themselves with sorrow--to play with it like children, and are seldom ashamed of being unhappy.

Maxim Gorky

#8. Wishful thinking won't make the Palestinians an Israeli peace partner, no matter how much President Barack Obama pressures Israel to make concessions; caustically mocking Putin's worldview won't make it any less real or mitigate the Russian threat.

Ben Shapiro

#9. I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.

Robert Hass

#10. Musical chairs or Russian roulette? Sometimes there's as much tense drama in the casting of a Hollywood movie as there is in the finished product.

Richard Corliss

#11. We still believe that if the Russian Federation and the United States bring their minds together, we can develop a common system which would be efficient in protecting the Euro-Atlantic region from threats coming outside this region.

Sergei Lavrov

#12. If we continue at this leisurly pace, we will have to pass Russian customs when we land on the moon.

Wernher Von Braun

#13. I thought it was important to speak about what I believe would be the right response to Russian aggression in Ukraine. I'm pleased to hear there is more sanctions maybe coming tomorrow. But the truth of the matter is I think we need less talk and more deeds.

Mike Pence

#14. Many Russia experts note the deep and sad capacity of the Russian people for suffering.

Roger Altman

#15. Yes, one day perhaps the leading intellects of Russia and of Europe will study the psychology of Russian crime, for the subject is worth it. But

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#16. Defense, national security, and law enforcement now eat up 34 percent of the Russian budget, more than double the share in 2010. That dwarfs the 18 percent spent by the U.S. last year on defense and national security, according to the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Anonymous

#17. So," said the Russian, after regaining is composure, "the lesson of the model is that the universe - all its matter and forms of energy - arise out of thought.

Dean Koontz

#18. The malaise and military decline of the post-Vietnam years under President Jimmy Carter set the stage for Russian aggression abroad and uncertainty among our allies.

Paul Cook

#19. When you hear Portuguese, if you're listening fleetingly, it's as if you're hearing Russian, which never happens with Spanish. Because the Portuguese and the Russians share the open vowels and the dark "L," the "owL" sound.

Gregory Rabassa

#20. 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

#21. He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor's office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time, and he was translating for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients. On my way home, after running into him, I just heard this phrase in my head.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#22. I admire Tom Ades: he's a brilliant conductor, and he gets just the right hard, brilliant sound from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for Russian music.

Charles Hazlewood

#23. I hate vodka. It is the second worst thing to have come out of Russia, after communism - which isn't Russian anyway, Karl Marx was Russian.

Param Vyas

#24. Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#25. I was taken to my first fashion show - Nina Ricci haute couture - in Paris by the White Russian princess, down on her luck, whom I was boarding with in Paris in 1963. I was captivated by the glamour of the gilded salon, the elegant clothes, and the audience of grand ladies.

Suzy Menkes

#26. These statements absolutely do not correspond to reality. The Russian proposals are very simple stop all form of barter arrangements and shift to normal, market relations affecting gas supplies and gas transit.

Viktor Khristenko

#27. Any seed, that fell into Russian soil, does not give the fruit sower hoped for.

Victor Pelevin

#28. At this time I had complete confidence in Russian policy and believed that the Western Allies deliberately allowed Germany and Russia to fight each other to death.

Klaus Fuchs

#29. Germany's siege mentality and gnawing sense of encirclement (the need to 'storm out of the fortress' to prevent a Russian attack); Austria-Hungary's hatred of Serbia; Russia's deep fear of Germany; France's vengeful chauvinism; and Britain's ferocious Germanophobia.

Paul Ham

#30. The Russian revolution was to an unprecedented degree the cause of the proletariat of the whole world becoming more revolutionary.

Karl Liebknecht

#31. First we attacked the Russian soldiers with our gases, and then when we saw the poor fellows lying there, dying slowly, we tried to make breathing easier for them by using our own life-saving devices on them.

Otto Hahn

#32. Morris Halle was already working on a generative phonology of Russian in the 1950s, and we also worked together on the generative phonology of English, at first jointly with Fred Lukoff.

Noam Chomsky

#33. The real evil of the Russian communist state is not communism. It is the secret police and the concentration camp.

John Boyd Orr

#34. She decided that day to study Russian, the language of violence, terror, and absurdity. She knew she would never be bored.

Natalie Standiford

#35. For Russia, there is not and there may not be another political option but democracy. However, Russian democracy is ... not at all the realization of standards imposed on us from outside.

Vladimir Putin

#36. A big Russian lady, who seemed to be the household cook, supervised the making of zakuski
Russian hors d'oeuvres, which unfortunately didn't include pigs-in-a-blanket. What kind of party is this?

Nelson DeMille

#37. He filled a shelf with a small army of books and read and read; but none of it made sense.. They were all subject to various cramping limitations: those of the past were outdated, and those of the present were obsessed with the past.

Alexander Pushkin

#38. The Union was destroyed against the will of the people, and it was done deliberately - with the participation of the Russian leadership, on the one hand, and that of the putschists, on the other.

Mikhail Gorbachev

#39. Woman is deprived of rights from lack of education, and the lack of education results from the absence of rights. We must not forget that the subjection of women is so complete, and dates from such ages back that we are often unwilling to recognise the gulf that separates them from us.

Leo Tolstoy

#40. None of the bravado he usually showed was there. I guess there was "usually" and then there was being held in the grip of a really ripped, really tall, and really pissed off Russian guy.

Richelle Mead

#41. Are Russian cannibals worse than the English? Of course. The English eat only the feet, the Russians the soul. "The soul is a mirage," I told Anna Alexandrovna, but she went on eating mine anyway.

Charles Simic

#42. How can the confessor teach/ those who are lost and sick at heart,/ when he himself, among the sinners,/ is worst, and most forsaken?/ It is only a game we play/ with other people's sins./ Besides, everyone knows/ that everyone lies confessing.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

#43. Destroy your manuscript, but save whatever you have inscribed in the margin out of boredom, out of helplessness, and, as it were, in a dream. (The Egyptian Stamp)

Osip Mandelstam

#44. It looks like Russian," said Mrs. Knight. Her voice echoed in the lounge. It sounded like her vocal cords were made from the same pale rawhide used for dog toys.

Peter Clines

#45. I thought of how she'd been at three, at six, at nine. No one warns you about the losses. No one tells you you'll miss them, those earlier children. They disappear, but are they still there, sealed one inside the next like those little wooden Russian dolls?

Ann Harleman

#46. I do not like the idea that a Russian company cannot be successful without Western experience. I think that, at the end of the day, it is a question of bringing benchmarks from other countries. So far, the golden benchmark has been the West.

Maelle Gavet

#47. I was born in the night of the second and third
Of January, ninety-something-or-other,
An unreliable year, and the centuries
Surround me with fire.

Osip Mandelstam

#48. And everything stopped quite rapidly because I knew that nobody in Europe was able to go to space. It was the privilege of being either American or Russian.

Philippe Perrin

#49. The Russian empire under czars and commissars has been hard to deal with for other countries.

Henry A. Kissinger

#50. You're the Baba Yaga?" He gazed at her in disbelief. "But the Baba Yaga is an ugly old crone, and you're, you're... not!

Deborah Blake

#51. We know that Russian intelligence services, which is part of the Russian government which is under the firm control of Vladimir Putin, hacked into the DNC. And we know that he arranged for a lot of those emails to be released.

Hillary Clinton

#52. The remarkable thing about the Bolshevik insurrection is that hardly any of the Bolshevik leaders had wanted it to happen until a few hours before it began.

Orlando Figes

#53. Russian subs are a bargain at $60,000. Unfortunately, none of the dials or instructions are in English.

Paul Watson

#54. I am an English-speaking Canadian, but my entire family - Russian exiles and the Canadians they married - is buried in Quebec, and if Quebec were to separate, I would feel I had been cut in two.

Michael Ignatieff

#55. Despite elections and the experience of post-Soviet personal freedoms by the Russian people, the fate of democracy in Russia is perhaps more ambiguous now than at any time since the collapse of the Communist system.

Richard Lugar

#56. Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.

Salman Rushdie

#57. And still she felt more confident at the prospect of taking on the Russian Mafia than she did attending a backyard barbecue.

Nora Roberts

#58. Awe! Leaving so soon?" Gabby said sweetly, holding the door open. "I was just about to pull out the gun for you to play single-player Russian Roulette.

Laura Kreitzer

#59. I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.

Winston S. Churchill

#60. My tastes went all over the place, from Strauss to Mahler. I was never a big Wagner or Tchaikovsky fan. Benjamin Britten, Tallis, all the early English Medieval music, Prokofiev, some Russian composers, mostly the people that were the colorists, the French.

James Horner

#61. Russian Roulette is not the same without a gun

Lady Gaga

#62. I love going to see the theatre whether it's a Broadway play or a Russian ballet company.

Michael Ealy

#63. The most authentic Russian Impressionism leaves one perplexed if one compares it with Monet and Pissarro. Here, in the Louvre, before the canvases of Manet, Millet and others, I understood why my alliance with Russia and Russian art did not take root.

Marc Chagall

#64. Crash, from the Russian krashenina Noun: a rough fabric sometimes used to strengthen the spine of a book

Blue Balliett

#65. I'm eternally grateful to fate and the citizens of Russia that they've trusted me to be the head of the Russian government.

Vladimir Putin

#66. Well, at least this time I get to be a person in the story. The last time you told one of your Russian parables I was a bag of chickens.

Nora Ephron

#67. I like to listen to different kinds of music - it just depends on my mood. I love Madonna, Russian singers ... I like the Rolling Stones a lot!

Oksana Baiul

#68. I'm so good at my job the law thinks I'm three different hit men and a serial killer. I speak Russian and French, I never had a pet, and the reason why you hate my coffee is that it's decaf.

J. Fally

#69. I'm hoping my presence alone in Russia will be a show of strength for the Russian LGBT community,

Johnny Weir

#70. 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

#71. The Russian did not wave or speak, but he looked directly into Billy's soul with sweet hopefulness, as though Billy might have good news for him
news he might be too stupid to understand, but good news all the same.

Kurt Vonnegut

#72. I accept responsibility for U-boat warfare from 1933 onward, and of the entire navy from 1943 on, but to make me responsible for what happened to Jews in Germany, or Russian soldiers on the east front it is so ridiculous all I can do is laugh.

Karl Donitz

#73. I think somebody who speaks the language is going to notice immediately that I'm not Russian.

Nicholas Lea

#74. We believe Russian-American relations are broader and larger than emotions and mutual grudges, including the situation with the U.S. fugitive Edward Snowden.

Sergei Lavrov

#75. When writing dialogue, I hear it in both Russian and English, and try to find a language that combines the two.

David Bezmozgis

#76. One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.

Tobias Wolff

#77. Bill Gates finds people in Russia to hire them to Microsoft. That's the Russian interest in this process.

Anatoly Chubais

#78. I worked the drive-through at McDonald's and tried out different accents - Italian, Russian, Irish.

James Franco

#79. The qualifications for being a Scout seemed to be a shocking level of physical endurance, a complete disregard for mortal danger, and some knowledge of how to exist in a space suit. All of them were Russian.

Neal Stephenson

#80. 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

#81. Romania was an original mix: a population that looked Italian but wore the expressions of Russian peasants; an architectural backdrop that often evoked France and Central Europe; and service and physical conditions that resembled those in Africa.

Robert D. Kaplan

#82. ROMANOFF: Every Russian family line ends in a czar. That's the only way the genealogist gets paid, sir.

Margaret Stohl

#83. Rolling my trousers down to expose the upper part of my buttocks and having a knife pressed up and down my spine by a Russian white witch, as she murmured incantations, was certainly a new experience to cure my backache. It was surprisingly soothing.

Jonathan Dimbleby

#84. 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

#85. Some men say get them crying on your shoulder and you have the sheets half-unfurled already. Other fellows say get them laughing. I say get them drunk. I ordered up more Riesling ...

Stewart Hennessey

#86. According to the oil and gas industry and their proponents, I am a communist, terrorist, Nazi, Russian-sympathizing, anti-American, arsonist, extremist.

Josh Fox

#87. Let's not forget that one poll after another clearly demonstrates that well over 50% of Russian citizens still wants both socialism and the USSR back. And the Russian government is listening.

Andre Vltchek

#88. My father, a Russian translator, wanted to distinguish me by calling me Misha, the Russian diminutive of his name, Michael. My name and work as a writer specialising in the Balkans has created a myth that I have Slavic connections, but actually I am British.

Misha Glenny

#89. I was interviewed by the Moscow Times and they said how's it feel to know that every Russian school child has to read your Teenage Survival Guide? I said slightly terrifying.

Dee Snider

#90. I thought they spoke Russian in the Ukraine." "Well, yes. Depends what part of Ukraine. They're not so different languages, the two.

Donna Tartt

#91. When a Russian pig has to be beaten, it would be the ordinary German worker who would have to do it.

Robert Ley

#92. The first song is called 'London.' It's about two Russian soldiers who desert the Russian army and escape to London, where they indulge in a life of crime.

Neil Tennant

#93. I always think about the past, it's so large and bright.

Anna Akhmatova

#94. The Russian parliament has condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Vladimir Putin

#95. I think if German literature could survive the '40s and Russian literature could survive Sovietism, American literature can survive Google.

Joshua Cohen

#96. 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

#97. But she forgot nothing, and he sometimes forgot much too quickly, and, often that same day, encouraged by her composure, would laugh and frolic over the champagne, if friends stopped by. What venom must have been in her eyes at those moments yet he noticed nothing!

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#98. Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.

Vladimir Nabokov

#99. But then he touched the flowers
With the dry tips of his fingers.
Tell me how men kiss you.
Tell me how you kiss.

Anna Akhmatova

#100. I've played Latin, I've played Italian. And I've played the all-around regular girl. I think the thing about the way I look, is that I can look like many different things. People sometimes ask me if I'm Russian. I don't think I specifically look like a Puerto Rican or an Italian. Wouldn't you agree?

Lana Parrilla