May you have to live on your salary!  

  The Russian is a delightful person till he tucks in his shirt. As an oriental he is charming. It is only when he insists upon being treated as the most easterly of western peoples instead of the most westerly of easterns that he becomes a racial anomaly and extremely difficult to handle. The host never knows which side of his nature is going to turn up next.  

  More people are drowned in a glass than in the ocean.  

  Better to have one hundred friends than one hundred rubles.  

  Few nations have followed a historical trail quite as erratic, careening from feudalism to Brave New World, total war, famine, global might and finally collapse, all in the span of one average lifetime.  

  Rather, so many of them want merely a few moments peace and rest. They dream of sharing more time with their children and finding a few hours' personal time for themselves....This maternal and human bond is women's savior. Amidst the hardship of work and domestic obligations and the troubles that plague so many marriages, Russian women devote themselves completely to their own children, and thus escape the need to look for alternatives and possibilities for emancipation from the underlying problems.  

  With the mind alone Russia cannot be understood, No ordinary yardstick spans her greatness; She stands alone, unique - In Russia one can only believe.  

  Instruction shapes your mind; upbringing, your manners.  

  Contradiction is the essence of Russia. West and East, Pacific and Atlantic, Arctic and tropics, extreme cold and extreme heat, prolonged sloth and sudden feats of energy, exaggerated cruelty and exaggerated kindness, ostentatious wealth and dismal squalor, violent xenophobia and uncontrollable yearning for contact with the foreign world, vast power and the most abject slavery, simultaneous love and hate for the same objects...The Russian does not reject these contradictions. He has learned to live with them, and in them. To him, they are the spice of life.  

  If all laws perished, the people would live in truth and justice.  

  The city itself in Russia is an implanted thing, and...the urban man who has created the civilizations of the West is still in the making here. His habitual loneliness, his totally private life, his ignorance of his neighbors, his go-it-alone psychology - these are still in conflict in Russia with an older, way of communal existence.  

  I have never met anyone who understood Russians.  

  Together in the mir we will move even mountains.  

  Where there is sense, there is order.  

  In Russian culture, emotion is assigned an entirely positive value...the more a person expresses his emotions, the better, more sincere, and more 'open' he is.' Dusha is: 'sensitivity, reverie, imagination, an inclination to tears, compassion, submission mingled with stubbornness, patience that permits survival in what would seem to be unbearable circumstances, poetry, mysticism, fatalism, a penchant for walking the dark, humid back streets of consciousness, introspection, sudden, unmotivated cruelty, mistrust of rational thought, fascination with the word...'  

  God defend you from the sight of a Russian rebellion in all its ruthless stupidity.  

  How do you like the way we live on our salaries?  

  Russians are more emotional, more likely to strike deep friendships, less superficially gregarious. They make great sacrifices for those within their trusted circle, and they expect real sacrifices in return. Their willingness, indeed their eagerness, to engage at a personal level makes private life in Russia both enormously rich and incredibly entangling. Close emotional bonds are part of Russia's enchantment and also its complexity.  

  A man who was not Orthodox could not be Russian.  

  At home do as you wish, but in public as you are told.  

  The famous 'Russian soul' was to no small extent the product of this agonizing uncertainty regarding Russia's proper geographical, social, and spiritual position in the world, the awareness of a national personality that was split between East and West.  

  Everything should be beautiful in a person - the face and clothes, the soul and thought.  

  Logical categories are inapplicable to the soul. But Russian sensitivity, permeating the whole culture, doesn't want to use logic - logic is seen as dry and evil, logic comes from the devil - the most important thing is sensation, smell, emotion, tears, mist, dreams, and enigma.  

  On Russian literature, it repeatedly gives situations 'in which a beautiful, strong, well-integrated, decisive young woman becomes erotically implicated with some spineless, dithering pip-squeak of a man...'  

  Let other countries surpass us in the technology of computer production, but only we can provide an answer to the question: Why? For whose sake? We are the only legitimate heirs to the great, spiritual Russian culture. The saving of the world will come from Soviet Russia.