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Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?

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
Racism
Race
Form
Misanthropy

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The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.
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I don't have principles. I have nerves.
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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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If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one’s drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one’s language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.
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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.
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I'm a bad Jew, a bad Russian, a bad everything.
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There's nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.
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A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
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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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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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The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
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I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.
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In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.
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What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
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Language and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent-better yet, the infinite-against the temporary, against the finite.
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Man is what he reads.
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I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.
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I am quite prepared to die here [in NY]. It doesn't matter at all. I don't know better places, or perhaps if I do I am not prepared to make a move.
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For darkness restores what light cannot repair.
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If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck.
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