
“What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name — and moving on.”
A Short History of Decay (1949)
Book One in 'Unwelcome Visitors', MG
The Master and Margarita (1967)
“What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name — and moving on.”
A Short History of Decay (1949)
“At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years.”
"Father Severyan", in November 1916: The Red Wheel: Knot II (1984; translation 1999).
Context: At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church — none of them has been able to stop it. And don't succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state's essential functions. … War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from evil. In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses — but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction — and that is war.
“The surrounding world is different for each of us, despite moving in a common world”
Pedro Fernando, Book Train To Save The World (2022) - (PAULO FERNANDO FAZENDA MANUEL)
“How alike are the groans of love, to those of the dying.”
Source: Under the Volcano (1947), Ch. XII (p. 351)
Source: "Energy: basic facts for an informed debate" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRAMA4mT0z0, 2012.
Speaking at the Get Shamrocked Irish Festival (19 September 2014).