Quote

It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.

Joseph Brodsky

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Joseph Brodsky
Age: 55 †
Born: 1940
Born: May 24
Died: 1996
Died: January 25
Author
Dramaturge
Essayist
Playwright
Poet
Translator
Writer
St. Petersburg
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky
Would
Bases
Exile
Judge
Versus
Judging
Twelve
Leave
Soviet
System
Union
Cannot
Prefer
Country
Basis
Preferring
Enough
Unions
Jury

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An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.
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I'm not trying to be ridiculous or funny, but it was rather pleasant to find yourself in isolation, in solitary.
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I was quite happy in Arkhangelsk.Subsequently, I was sent to a village. I liked it in its own way because it sounded to me very much like the tradition of a hired man in any world-class poem. That's what I was, a hired man. I was working for a collective farm.
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Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
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Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die.
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For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
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In the West you have every opportunity for civilization to triumph.
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I don't have principles. I have nerves.
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Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man's recognition of hisown negative potential--with his sense of what he is capable of.
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Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?
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I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.
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I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.
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A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
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Love itself is the most elitist of passions. It acquires its stereoscopic substance and perspective only in the context of culture, for it takes up more place in the mind than it does in bed. Outside of that setting it falls flat into one-dimensional fiction.
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Man is what he reads.
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Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author's self-projection.
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A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre the realization of it, for destiny.
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After having exhausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters the creed's dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor.
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The Constitution doesn't mention rain.
Joseph Brodsky