"Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse"

Joseph Brodsky Literature See all quotes by Joseph Brodsky →

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“This is just one example of the trimming of the self that — along with the language itself, where verbs and nouns changed places as freely as one dare to have them do so — bred in us such an overpowering sense of ambivalence that in ten years we ended up with a willpower in no way superior to a seaweed’s.”

“The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time. This is what really bothers you, that you can't win. Prison is lack of alternatives, and the telescopic predictability of the future is what drives you crazy.”

“It is the army that finally makes a citizen of you; without it you still have a chance, however slim, to remain a human being.”

“Some prose and essays by Brodsky in Russian”

“Last published interview”

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"Now, if instituting comparisons in both directions, we place the lowest and most ape-like men , on the one hand, together with the most highly developed animals, for instance, with apes, dogs, and ele…"

— Baruch Spinoza

Philosophy1632–1677

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"I conceived, developed and applied in many areas a new geometry of nature, which finds order in chaotic shapes and processes. It grew without a name until 1975, when I coined a new word to denote it, …"

— Benoît Mandelbrot

Mathematics1924–2010

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"What we do want is so to arrange things that every human being born into the world shall be ensured the opportunity in the first instance of learning some useful occupation, and of becoming skill in i…"

— Peter Kropotkin

Philosophy1842–1921

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