Quotations

Ed Miliband, after losing the 2015 election (which meant David Cameron had to fulfil his promise to call a Brexit referendum), said: "When you win, everything you did was an act of genius and when you lose, everything you did was the work of a fool."


Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: "Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career."


Mario Vargas Llosa: "We live as many lives as we read books."

From Tolstoy by A. N. Wilson, quoted by Eric Kraus: “Being Russian, unless you are preternaturally stupid or wicked, produces violent inner tensions and conflicts, reflected in nearly all the great imaginative geniuses to emerge from Russia in the last two centuries. On the one hand, you know that you have been born into a ‘God-bearing’ nation, whose destiny is to keep burning the flame of truth while the other nations languish in decadence. (The truth may be Orthodox Christianity or the creeds of Marxist-Leninism, but the feeling is the same.) You know that the Russians are best at everything from poetry to gymnastics, and that they invented everything: ballet, bicycles, the internal combustion engine. You know that Russia has more soul than any other country – that its birch avenues, its snows, its ice, its summers are all the more glorious than the manifestations of nature in more benighted countries. There is only one drawback, which is that it is completely horrible to live there.”