"She's like snow in Russian," said Anna. "Snow in the evening when the sun sets and it looks like Alpengluhen, you know? And if snow had a scent it would smell like that [the rose]...."
— Eva Ibbotson (A Countess Below Stairs)

"It was like a Russian party, Arkady thought. People got drunk, recklessly confessed their love, spilled their festering dislike, had hysterics, marched out, were dragged back in and revived with brandy. It wasn't a French salon."
— Martin Cruz Smith

"It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; "
— Winston S. Churchill

"The earth was blue but there was no god."
— Yuri Gagarin

"Why did you come in to-night with your heads in the air? 'Make way, we are coming! Give us every right and don't you dare breathe a word before us. Pay us every sort of respect, such as no one's ever heard of, and we shall treat you worse than the lowest lackey!' They strive for justice, they stand on their rights, and yet they've slandered him like infidels in their article. We demand, we don't ask, and you will get no gratitude from us, because you are acting for the satisfaction of your own conscience! Queer sort of reasoning!... He has not borrowed money from you, he doesn't owe you anything, so what are you reckoning on, if not his gratitude? So how can you repudiate it? Lunatics! They regard society as savage and inhuman, because it cries shame on the seduced girl; but if you think society inhuman, you must think that the girl suffers from the censure of society, and if she does, how is it you expose her to society in the newspapers and expect her not to suffer? Lunatics! Vain creatures! They don't believe in God, they don't believe in Christ! Why, you are so eaten up with pride and vanity that you'll end by eating up one another, that's what I prophesy. Isn't that topsy-turvydom, isn't it infamy?"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot)

"But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these benalities"
— Boris Pasternak

"But there was another class of people, the real people. To this class they all belonged, and in it the great thing was to be elegant, generous, plucky, gay, to abandon oneself without a blush to every passion, and to laugh at everything else."
— Leo Tolstoy

"I must add... my gratitude to you for the attention with which you have listened to me, for, from my numerous observations, our Liberals are never capable of letting anyone else have a conviction of his own without at once meeting their opponent with abuse or even something worse."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot)

"We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them. "
— Vladimir Putin

"In the first place, what is Liberalism, speaking generally, but an attack... on the established order of things? That's so, isn't it? Well, my fact is that Russian Liberalism is not an attack on the existing order of things, but is an attack on the very essence of things, on the things themselves.... My Liberal goes so far as to deny even Russia itself, that is, he hates and beats his own mother. Every unhappy and disastrous fact in Russia excites his laughter and almost his delight. He hates the national habits, Russian history, everything. If there is any justification for him, it is that he doesn't know what he is about and takes his hatred of Russia for Liberalism of the most fruitful kind.... This hatred of Russia was quite lately almost regarded as sincere love for their country. They boasted that they know better than other people how that love ought to show itself; but now they have become more candid and are ashamed of the very idea of 'loving' one's country.... How can we explain it among us? Why, by the same fact as before, that the Russian Liberal hitherto has not been Russian; nothing else explains it, to my thinking."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot)