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" The invention of ethical and political doctrines, which blossomed into our own social sciences, is a product of times when things appeared manageable. The same goes for the criticism of those doctrines, though as a voice from the past, this criticism proved prophetic. "

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" A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave - as he thinks at that moment - a trace on the earth. "

Joseph Brodsky

Mind

Heart

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" Bad politics make for bad morals. "

" It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything. "

" Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse. "

" No man-made system is perfect, and the system of oppression is no exception. It is subject to fatigue, to cracks, which you are the likelier to discover the longer your term. "

" Who included me among the ranks of the human race? "

" What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness. "

" I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You realize what you are... not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding. "

Joseph Brodsky

You

Reality

" The concept of historical necessity is the product of rational thought and arrived in Russia by the Western route. The idea of the noble savage, of an inherently good human nature hampered by bad institutions, of the ideal state, of social justice and so forth - none of these originated or blossomed on the banks of the Volga. "

" The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie. "

" Venice is eternity itself. "

" The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed. "

" I belong to Russian literature, but I am an American citizen, and I think it's the best possible combination. "

" Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable. "

" I was fortunate enough to write about things I really love, and love can be very analytic. "

" An ethical man doesn't need a consensus of his allies in order to act against something he finds reprehensible. "

" I remember myself, age five, sitting on a porch overlooking a very muddy road. The day was rainy. I was wearing rubber boots, yellow - no, not yellow, green - and for all I know, I'm still there. "

" Basically, it's hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That's what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man. "

" Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair. "

" Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them there comes a moment when the center ceases to hold. What keeps them at such times from disintegration is not legions but language. "

" Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. "

" Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets. "

" For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance. "

" After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism. "