480 Quotes About Russia

According to a much quoted Russian saying 'the country has two eternal problems, roads and idiots'.

[it was] perceived that it was easier to rise upwards east of the Urals. A man who left Russia as a common soldier became a sergeant in Tobolsk, a captain in Yakutsk and a colonel in Kamchatka.

The Soviet period was a disaster, not least because supply lines were so long and so corrupt that little was left by the time goods reached the Russian Far East except things nobody wanted, such as the fabled ten thousand left-foot gumboots. (On that occasion, transport planning failed to the extent that the 10,000 left boots went in the opposite direction to the same number of right boots, heading nobody knew where).

It was true—if Emilia didn't hear about it, it didn't happen. Her trades were gemstones and gossip, and she was a master of both, collecting rumors the way scholars collected books.

I don't mind whether a person is rich or poor. Once my friend, always my friend. --Tsarina Alexandra of Russia (1872-1918)

But, along with the street lamp, everything breathes deceit. It lies all the time, this Nevsky Prospect, but most of all at the time when night heaves its dense mass upon it and sets off the white and pale yellow walls of the houses, when the whole city turns into a rumbling and brilliance, myriads of carriages tumble from the bridges, postillions shout and bounce on their horses, and the devil himself lights the lamps only so as to show everything not as it really looks.

There is no morality to be found in evil.But to recognise that which is truly evil one must forget the rules of morality.

But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.

The common theme here was contempt: a poisonous disregard for human life. For Vladimir Putin’s critics have an uncanny habit of turning up dead.