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![]() . . . see: "CIVILIZATION" see: "DISCIPLINE" see: "LAWS" see: "PARENTING" We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules. --Alan Bennett (b. 1934) English actor and playwright. "Getting On", act 1 [1971] There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other particular. The first is that every one can, in the end, get what he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is, more or less, an exception to the general rule. --Samuel Butler (18351902) English novelist, essayist, and critic. _The Note-Books of Samuel Butler_, ch. I "Lord, What is Man?"; ed. Henry Festing Jones [1917]. [In 1903, when chemist Martin Andrι Rosanoff inquired about the laboratory rules and regulations, Thomas Edison spat on the floor and said:] Hell, there ain't no rules around here! We're tryin' to accomplish somep'n. --Thomas Alva Edison (18471931) American inventor. Quoted in "Popular Science" [December 1959]. The golden rule: whoever has the gold makes the rules. --Todd Gitlin and Nanci Hollander, _Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago_ [1970] It was one of the rules which, above all others, made Doctor [Benjamin] Franklin the most amiable of men in society, 'never to contradict anybody.' --Thomas Jefferson (17431826) American statesman and president [1801-09]. Letter to Thomas Jefferson Randolph [24 November 1808]. The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you're playing by other people's rules, while quietly playing by your own. --Michael Korda (b. 1933) British-American author. _Success_ [1977] Rules are made to be broken. --"Ladies Home Journal" [January 1899] As quoted in Fred R. Shapiro (ed.) _The Yale Book of Quotations_, p. 619 [2006]. The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are. --Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121180) Roman emperor [161-80] and Stoic philosopher. Attributed in Norman Vincent Peale _You Can If You Think You Can_, p. 56 [1987]. ^ Groucho [Julius Henry] Marx (18951977) American comedian. The maξtre d'hτtel stopped Groucho as he was about to enter the dining room of a smart Los Angeles hotel. 'I am sorry, sir, but you have no necktie.' 'That's all right,' said Groucho, 'don't be sorry. I remember the time when I had no pants.' 'I am sorry, sir,' repeated the man, 'you cannot enter the dining room without a necktie.' Groucho caught sight of a bald man in the center of the dining room and yelled, 'Look! Look at him! You won't let me in without a necktie, but you let him in without his hair!' --_Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes_ edited by Clifton Fadiman and Andrι Bernard [2000 ed.] ^ Rules of society are nothing, one's conscience is the umpire. --George Sand [pseudonym of Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin] (18041876) French author. Quoted in "The Guernsey Magazine" [August 1877]. My own belief is not rule for another. --John Wesley (17031791) English preacher and founder, with his brother Charles, of the Methodist movement in the Church of England. Quoted in Henry Thomas and Dana Lee Thomas, in _Living Biographies of Religious Leaders_ [1946] "John Wesley". The best rules to form a young man are to talk little, to hear much, to reflect alone upon what has passed in company, to distrust one's own opinions, and value others that deserve it. --Sir William Temple (16281699) English statesman and diplomat. Quoted in John Timbs _Laconics: Or, The Best Words of the Best Authors_, p. 196 [1829]. The exception proves the rule. --John Wilson _Cheats_ [1664] ----- martinet [mar-t'n-ET], noun: 1. A strict disciplinarian. 2. One who lays stress on a rigid adherence to the details of forms and methods. proscribe (verb) [pro-'skrIb ] To prohibit or forbid as a bad practice. ![]() . . see: "BUSYBODIES" see: "GOSSIP" see: "REPUTATION" see: "SLANDER" see: "HURTING (SOMEONE)" for other related links see: "COMMUNICATION" for other related links Death is a distant rumor to the young. --attributed to Andy Rooney (19192011) American news commentator, producer, and author. I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as 'twas said to me. --Sir Walter Scott (17711832) Scottish novelist and poet. _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ [1805] Rumor is a pipe, Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures, And of so easy and so plain a stop That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, The still-discordant wavering multitude, Can play upon it. --William Shakespeare (15641616) English dramatist. _Henry IV, Part 2_, "Induction" [1596-99] The tale-bearer and the tale-hearer should be both hanged up, back to back, one by the tongue, the other by the ear. --Robert South (16341716) English theologian and author. Attributed in Tryon Edwards _A Dictionary of Thoughts_, p. 504 [1891 ed.]. - The rolling fictions grow in strength and size, Each author adding to the former lies. --Jonathan Swift (16671745) Anglo-Irish poet and satirist. "The Examiner", no. 15 [9 November 1710] Convey a libel in a frown. And wink a reputation down. --Jonathan Swift (16671745) Anglo-Irish poet and satirist. "The Journal of a Modern Lady" [1728] - There are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has taken to drink. --Booth Tarkington (18691946) American novelist and dramatist. _Penrod_ [1914] ![]() . . see: "EXERCISE" see: "JOGGING" see: "ENTERTAINMENT, HOBBIES, & LEISURE ACTIVITIES" for other related links ^^ Carol Burnett (b. 1933) American actress. Climbing out of a cab one day, Miss Burnett inadvertently caught her coat in the door. As the driver continued on his way, unaware of the accident, the comedienne was obliged to run alongside the moving vehicle to avoid being pulled off her feet. A quick-thinking passerby, noticing her plight, hailed the cab and alerted the driver. Having released Miss Burnett's coat, the driver asked her anxiously, 'Are you all right?' 'Yes,' she replied, still gasping for breath, 'but how much more do I owe you?' --_Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes_ edited by Clifton Fadiman and Andrι Bernard [2000 ed.] ^^ Now, *here* you see, it takes all the running *you* can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that! --Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (18321898) English writer and logician. _Thorough the Looking-Glass_, ch. 2 [1872] - Many writers have described the Tarahumaras and their incredible running abilities. These Indians from Mexico routinely run distances covered only by the most advanced ultra-marathoners from north of the border. Legend has it that a marathon promoter once invited a team of Tarahumaras to his race. When the Indians learned how short the distance was, they sent only women. --Joe Henderson In Dick and Mary Lutz, _The Running Indians: The Tarahumara of Mexico_ [1989], "Foreword") The Tarahumara are amazing endurance runners. They may run 200 miles over a period of three days and nights. To this day, one of the methods used by the Tarahumara to hunt deer is to chase the animal until it drops from exhaustion. Rabbits and wild turkeys are also hunted in this manner. Within recent decades the Tarahumara were sometimes hired by nearby ranchers to chase and capture wild horses. --ibid. Probably the longest run (not race) on record is that of a Tarahumara man running nearly 600 miles in five days to deliver an important message. --ibid. - I am a bomb technician. If you see me running-- Try to catch up! --T-shirt ![]() . . see: "COLD WAR" see: "COMMUNISM" see: "PLACES" for related links I did more for the Russian serf in giving him land as well as personal liberty, than America did for the negro slave set free by the proclamation of President Lincoln. --Alexander II [Aleksandr Nikolayevich] (18181881) Emperor of Russia [1855-81]. Interview of 17 August 1879, quoted in M.J. Cohan and John Major (eds.) _History in Quotations_, p. 676 [2004]. Cohan & Major add: The Russian serfs were landless peasants in bondage to their masters for life. They were freed by the 'Tsar Liberator', Alexander II, in 1861, the year before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Now a man talks frankly only with his wife, at night, with the blanket over his head. --Isaac Babel (18941940) Russian short-story writer. Remark, c. 1937, in Solomon Volkov _St Petersburg_ [1996]. The Lord God has given us vast forests, immense fields, wide horizons, surely we ought to be giants, living in such a country as this. --Anton Chekhov (18601904) Russian dramatist and short-story writer. _The Cherry Orchard_ [1904] - I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. --Winston Churchill (18741965) British Conservative statesman and Prime Minister [1940-45, 1951-55]. Radio broadcast [1 October 1939]. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. --Winston Churchill (18741965) British Conservative statesman and Prime Minister [1940-45, 1951-55]. Speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Mo. [5 March 1946]. & note: An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind. --Churchill telegram to Truman [12 May 1945] & see: We were behind the 'iron curtain' at last! --Ethel Snowden (18811951) English reformer. _Through Bolshevik Russia_, ch. 2 [1920] & see: With a rumble and a roar, an iron curtain is descending on Russian history. --Vasilii Rozanov (18561919) Russian writer and philosopher. _Apocalypse of Our Time_ [1918] & finally: Between [Germany] and me there is now a bloody iron curtain which has descended forever! --Elisabeth of Bavaria (18761965) Queen consort of Albert I of Belgium. On the eve of World War I, quoted in Tom Burnam _The Dictionary of Misinformation_ [1975]. - - The Russian government is an absolute monarchy tempered by assassination. --Astolphe Louis Leonard, Marquis de Custine (17901857) French writer, playwright, poet and traveler. _La Russie en 1839_, vol I [1843] Whoever has really seen Russia will find himself content to live anywhere else. It is always good to know that a society exists where no happiness is possible because, by a law of nature, man cannot be happy unless he is free. --Astolphe Louis Leonard, Marquis de Custine (17901857) French writer, playwright, poet and traveler. _La Russia en 1839_ [1843], "Peterhof, July 23, 1839" - One day Mikoyan and I were taking a walk around the grounds and Stalin came out on the porch of the house. He seemed not to notice Mikoyan and me. 'I'm finished,' he said to no one in particular. 'I trust no one, not even myself.' --Nikita Khrushchev (18941971) Soviet statesman, Premier [1958-64]. _Khruschev Remembers_ , pp. 306-7 [1971] - In the terrible spring of 1933 I saw people dying from hunger. I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing but with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts, in the melting snow of the old Vologda, under the bridges of Kharkov [...] I saw all this and did not go out of my mind or commit suicide. --Lev Kopelev (19121997) Soviet author and Party activist. _The Education of a True Believer_, p. 12 [1977] & see The 'famine' is mostly bunk. --Walter Duranty to H.R. Knickerbocker [27 June 1933]; S. J. Taylor _Stalin's Apologist_, p. 210 [1990], as quoted in M.J. Cohan and John Major (eds.) _History in Quotations_, p. 738 [2004]. Cohan & Major add: Duranty was Moscow correspondent of the New York Times and an uncritical admirer of Stalin. - - You must [...] *instantly* introduce mass terror, *shoot and transport* hundreds of prostitutes who get the soldiers drunk, ex-officers, etc. Not a minute to be wasted [...] You must act at full stretch: mass searches. Executions for possession of weapons. Mass deportations of Mensheviks and unreliable elements. --V.I. Lenin (18701924) Russian revolutionary and first head of the Soviet state (1917-24). [Telegram of 9 August 1918.] All educational work in the Soviet Republic of workers and peasants, in the field of political education in general and in the field of art in particular, should be imbued with the spirit of the class struggle being waged by the proletariat for the successful achievement of the aims of its dictatorship. --V.I. Lenin (18701924) Russian revolutionary and first head of the Soviet state (1917-24). [8 October 1920], quoted in _Lenin Selected Works_ [1975 ed.] They [capitalists] will furnish credits which will serve us for the support of the Communist Party in their countries and, by supplying us materials and technical equipment which we lack, will restore our military industry necessary for our future attacks against our suppliers. To put it in other words, they will work on the preparation of their own suicide. --V.I. Lenin (18701924) Russian revolutionary and first head of the Soviet state (1917-24). Quoted in "Novyi Zhurnal" (The New Review) [September 1961]. - [Of the Hungarian uprising:] The Soviet troops are assisting the Hungarian people to retain their independence from imperialism. --_Daily Worker_ (London) [7 November 1956] If you think that we will ever allow anybody to speak and write anything that comes into his head, then this will never be. --V. A. Medvedev, secretary for ideology of the Leningrad party committee, to the mathematician Revolt Pimenov [July 1970]. Russia has two generals in whom she can confide Generals Janvier [January] and Fιvrier [February]. --Nicholas I (17961855) Russian emperor from 1825. Attributed, in "Punch" [10 March 1855]. In the current decade [19611970] the Soviet Union, in creating the material and technical basis of communism, will surpass the strongest and richest capitalist country, the USA, in production per head of population; the people's standard of living and their cultural and technical standards will improve substantially; everyone will live in easy circumstances; all collective and state farms will become highly productive and profitable enterprises; the demand of the Soviet people for well-appointed housing will, in the main, be satisfied; hard physical work will disappear; the USSR will have the shortest working day. --Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, adopted by the 22nd Party Congress [31 October 1961]; in _New York Times [29 November 1961]. If Russia chooses to develop purely on her own line and to resist the growth of liberalism, then she may put off the day of reckoning; but she cannot ultimately avert it, and [...] she will sometime experience a real terror which will make the French Revolution pale. --Theodore Roosevelt (18581919) American Republican statesman and President [1901-09]. To Cecil Spring Rice [13 August 1897], in Elting Morison (ed.) _The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt_ v. 1, p. 647 [1951]. - For most people in the West, the word "gulag" refers to the system of forced labor camps that entrapped millions of citizens of the former Soviet Union. Begun under Lenin but vastly expanded under Stalin, the Gulag (Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1973 book, "The Gulag Archipelago," gave full currency to the term) comprised thousands of prisons, camps and exile communities. It was intended to isolate the regime's opponents, real and imagined, and to inflict punishment. It also served the country's economy, providing workers for mines, timber harvesting and construction. Lynne Viola's "The Unknown Gulag" reminds us that, before Stalin began his mass roundups in the mid-1930s, a program of forced collectivization was already devastating the Soviet countryside. The program was intended to consolidate roughly 25 million individual peasant households into collective farms and thereby free up labor for industrial work in the cities. Stalin believed that, among the peasants, the land-owning kulaks constituted a class enemy Lenin had called them "callous, savage exploiters." They would have to be separated from the other peasants to ensure the success of collectivization. The kulaks and their families made up about a fifth of the country's peasant class. In 1930, the regime began deporting about two million of them to "special settlements" in the northern territories, the Urals, Siberia, Kazakhstan and the Far East. It was Stalin's first act of mass terror. "The brutality and senselessness of dekulakization," writes Ms. Viola, "created an impression of rupture . . . as the peasant world was turned upside down." Party cadres would descend on villages "like the troops of an invading army, threatening, destroying, stealing, and arresting." There were incidents of rape and murder. Rounded up in their villages and deprived of their possessions, the kulaks and their families were transported under armed guard to remote locations, where they were expected to build barracks and begin working in forests or industrial enterprises. But the regime failed to provide adequate food, shelter or medical care. Resettled peasants were reduced to eating "food surrogates," as one official reported, referring to grass, roots and bark. The mortality rates were staggering, particularly for the children, who succumbed to epidemics of typhus and measles. Ms. Viola quotes from letters (intercepted by Soviet officials) expressing despair and making pleas for assistance from relatives back home. The whole experiment proved to be "a human catastrophe and economic boondoggle," writes Ms. Viola. Historians have long been aware of the scale of collectivization and the exile of the kulaks. But "The Unknown Gulag" provides the human voices that were secreted away for decades in formerly closed archives. Ms. Viola's painstaking research lays the foundation for a compelling and, in certain ways, surprising narrative. The regime knew about the tragic effects of collectivization. Party bureaucrats reported to Moscow on the epidemics that ravaged the population, the inability of sick and famished adults to work, the lack of schools for the children, and the frequent acts of defiance against such brutality. Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, privately complained about the plight of the children. In 1931, Nikolai Ezhov, who later became head of the Soviet secret police, submitted candid reports about the "horrendous conditions" faced by the resettled peasants. And Genrikh Iagoda, who headed the secret police at the time, insisted on the need for housing, schools and hospitals. But the system, as Ms. Viola writes, proved "impervious to reform." One party secretary, Sergei Bergavinov, who was in charge of the northern territories, was appalled at the conditions but preferred to play down reports of suffering. Another party official, Mikhail Tolmachev, sought to document how many peasants had been "incorrectly exiled" and complained bitterly of the hardships they endured. Stalin and the Politburo had little patience for Tolmachev's appeals, and he was soon stripped of authority. It is a vivid testament to Stalin's cruel logic that both Bergavinov and Tolmachev were to be arrested and executed in 1937, the year of the Great Terror. Even after Stalin's death in 1953, Soviet leaders could not acknowledge the injustice that had been done to the peasants. When Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin in his famous "secret speech" in February 1956, he failed to include the deportation of the kulaks among the dictator's many crimes. But collectivization laid the groundwork for the full authority of the secret police, the Gulag's system of forced labor, the devastation of Soviet agriculture and the famine that followed from it. No wonder Khrushchev chose not to mention it. To do so would have required exposing, in the so-called workers' state, a full-scale assault on the country's population. --Joshua Rubenstein "The Crimes of the Countryside", reviewing Lynne Viola's _The Unknown Gulag_ [2007] in "The Wall Street Journal" [26 April 2007]. (See Stalin quote below.) - - [On leaving the Hotel Metropole, writing in the visitors' book:] Tomorrow I leave this land of hope [Russia] and return to our Western countries of despair. --George Bernard Shaw (18561950) Irish dramatist and critic. Quoted in David Caute _The Fellow-Travellers: A Postscript to the Enlightenment_ [1973]. & see: Soviet Russia represents a new civilization and a new culture with a new outlook on life, involving a new pattern of behavior alike in personal conduct and in the relation of the individual to the community; all of which I believe is destined to spread, owing to its superior intellectual and ethical fitness, to many other countries in the course of the next hundred years. --Beatrice Webb [nιe Potter] (18581943) English Socialist economist. Diary entry [28 July 1932]. & see: Russia proves that you can change human nature sufficiently in one generation ... these kids despise a business man ... Service for profit is a sham ... I believe they will make a race, the meanest of which will be as noble as the best men of our day. --Lincoln Steffens (18661936) American journalist. In _The Letters of Lincoln Steffens_ v. 2, pp. 627-8 [1938]. & see: In the abominable distress of the present world now Russia's Plans seem to me salvation ... the miserable arguments of its enemies, far from convincing me, make my blood boil. --Andre Gide (18691951) on 23 April 1932; French novelist and critic who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. & see: The Soviet labour camp provided a freedom for its inmates not usual in our own prisons in this country. --Pat Sloan British communist. _Russia Without Illusions_ [1938] & see: Fear haunts workers in a capitalist land. Fear of dismissal, fear that a thousand workless men stand outside the gate eager to get his job, breaks the spirit of a man and breeds servility. Fear of unemployment, fear of slump, fear of trade depression, fear of sickness, fear of an impoverished old age lie with crushing weight on the mind of the worker ... Nothing strikes the visitor to the Soviet Union more forcibly than the absence of fear. --Rev. Hewlett Johnson (18741966) English clergyman. _The Socialist Sixth of the World_ [1939] The previous six entries are from M.J. Cohan and John Major (eds.) _History in Quotations_, p. 744-5 [2004]. - The small hall echoed with stormy applause, rising to an ovation! ... However, who would dare to be the *first* to stop? ... After eleven minutes the director of the paper factory assumed a business-like expression and sat down in his seat ... That same night the factory director was arrested [and] his interrogator reminded him: 'Don't ever be the first to stop applauding!' --Alexander Solzhenitsyn (19182008) Russian novelist. _The Gulag Archipelago_, pp. 27-8 [1999 edn.]. - Gaiety is the outstanding feature of the Soviet Union. --Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18791953), Soviet Communist leader and head of the USSR from the death of V. I. Lenin (1924) until his own death. (Attributed 1935 comment.) Now we are able to carry on a determined offensive against the kulaks, eliminate them as a class ... It is ridiculous and foolish to discourse at length on dekulakization. When the head is off one does not mourn for the hair. --Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18791953), Soviet Communist leader and head of the USSR from the death of V. I. Lenin (1924) until his own death. In M.J. Cohan and John Major (eds.) _History in Quotations_, p. 737 [2004]. Cohan & Major note: The kulaks, the richer peasants, were now seen as the enemy of the state and the most serious obstacle to socialization of the economy. & see The 'kulak' child was loathsome, the young 'kulak' girl was lower than a louse. They looked on the so called 'kulaks' as cattle, swine, loathsome, repulsive. They had no souls; they stank; they all had venereal diseases; they were enemies of the people and exploited the labor of others. --Vasily Grossman (19051964) Russian writer and journalist. _Forever Flowing_ [1972] - 'So you've been over to Russia?' said Bernard Baruch, and I answered very literally, 'I have been over into the future and it works.' --Lincoln Steffens (18661936) American journalist. In _The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens_, v. 2, p. 79 [1931]. [Conversation in April 1919.] There are today two great peoples on earth, who, though they started from different points, seem to be advancing toward the same goal: the Russians and the Anglo-Americans. [...] each seems called by a secret design of Providence some day to sway the destinies of half the globe. --Alexis de Tocqueville (18051859) French historian and politician. _Democracy in America_, vol. I, pt. 2, ch. 10 [1835] (Arthur Goldhammer translation) Freedom of assembly is granted, but the assemblies are surrounded by the military. Freedom of speech is granted, but censorship exists as before. Freedom of knowledge is granted, but the universities are occupied by troops. Inviolability of the person is granted, but the prisons are overflowing, --Leon Trotsky (18791940) Russian revolutionary. Referring to the October Manifesto of 1905, in Sidney Harcave _First Blood_, p. 244 [1964]. If someone rapes a boyar's [member of the old aristocracy's] daughter or a boyar's wife [then he is to pay] 5 grivnas [coins] of gold for the dishonour, and 5 grivnas of gold to the bishop; and if she be [a daughter or a wife] of lesser boyars 1 grivna of gold, and 1 grivna of gold to the bishop ... [if she be a daughter or wife] of common people, 15 grivnas [of fur] to her and 15 grivnas [of fur] to the bishop. --Yaroslav I [Yaroslav the Wise] (9801054) Grand prince of Kiev. Quoted in M.J. Cohan and John Major (eds.) _History in Quotations_ [2004]. - Every country has its own constitution; ours is absolutism moderated by assassination. --anon. Ernst Frederich Herbert, quoting an "intelligent Russian" in _Political Sketches of the State of Europe 1814-1867_ [1868]. end page | RABBITS - RAIN | RAP - READING | REAGAN (RONALD) - RECOGNITION | RED HEADS - RELIEF | RELIGION - PAGE 1 (A-M) | RELIGION - PAGE 2 (N-Z) | REMEMBERING - REPORTERS | REPUTATION - RESPONSIBILITY | REST - REUNIONS | REVENGE - REWARD | RICH (THE) - RIGHTEOUS | RIGHTS - ROLLER COASTERS | ROMANCE - RUDENESS | RULES - RUSSIA | | R | S | T | U - END | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The Reviews | |
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