Quote by Theodore Dalrymple

“Governments too steady and uniform, as they are seldom free, so are they, in the judgment of some attended with another sensible inconvenience: they…

— David Hume

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

— D. H. Lawrence

“The fundamental principle of the Russian government has always been the autocratic ruler who combines all legislative and executive powers and disposes of all…

— Martin Sixsmith

“The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers…

— Mason Currey

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

— Oliver Bullough

“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

Lenin sensed that Tukhachevsky was a kindred spirit. He delegated the most responsible jobs to the obscure lieutenant.

— Mikhail Tukhachevsky

“Everything is PR” has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both…

— Peter Pomerantsev

[Mikhail Bakunin] expectations were generally confirmed, including his prediction that some would seek to gain state power on the backs of popular revolution, then…

— Noam Chomsky

“Authority in Russia had always been transferred through natural death, conspiracy or revolution,”

— Steven Lee Myers

“This political line is wholly neo-Soviet: human beings do not have independent existences, they are cogs in the machine whose function is to implement…

— Anna Politkovskaya

This power, this authority, Soviet power: they killed everybody who could make any resistance, who could explain his own way of thinking and who…

— Vladimir Bukovsky