Great people Quote by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“The most basic, most rudimentary spiritual need of the Russian people is the need for suffering, ever-present and unquenchable, everywhere and in everything.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“He was a mostly mild man with a weakness for passion, a suburban father burdened with the heart of a Russian hero without any…

— Suzanne Berne

“Entire civilizations in history had ceased to exist. How had life in them felt in the last decades and days? Russia and the Russians…

— Masha Gessen

“To survive and be happy, Russians have so much to bury, to willfully ignore. Small wonder that the intensity of their pleasures and indulgences…

— Owen Matthews

“From an encounter in 1862... “Dickens told me,” Dostoyevsky recalled in a letter written years later, “that all the good, simple people in his…

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.

— D. H. Lawrence

“God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless. Those who plot impossible upheavals among us, are either young and do not…

— Alexander Pushkin

“The Soviet state was, in fact, almost perfectly designed to make people unhappy. It denied its citizens not just hope, but also trust. Every…

— Oliver Bullough

“Russians consider themselves civilized Europeans, but have to endure the humiliation of daily encounters with officials that belong in a squalid dictatorship.”

— Oliver Bullough

“Russians are among the nicest people that I have met in life.”

— Steven Magee

As awful as the crimes of Stalinism were, the vast majority of the Russian population was trying to survive, to love, to have a…

— Amor Towles

“I was involuntarily struck by the aptitude which the Russian displays for accommodating himself to the customs of the people in whose midst he…

— Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov