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citizens. As it was in most Russian cities, winter was Gorkiy’s best season. The snow hid all the dirt.
A wise man knows his limitations.” And a bold one seizes opportunities.
In the Soviet Union every worker is a government worker, and they have a saying: As long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work.
and as he grew older Marko learned that Marxism-Leninism was a jealous god, tolerating no competing loyalties.
The Good of the People was a laudable enough goal, but in denying a man’s soul, an enduring part of his being, Marxism stripped away the foundation of human dignity and individual value. It also cast aside the objective measure of justice and ethics which, he decided, was the principal legacy of religion to civilized life.
After the war he’d been given a kind of freedom for his services, the right to perform backbreaking work under perpetual suspicion.
preparation, knowledge, and discipline can deal with any form of danger; that danger confronted properly is not something a man must fear.
men who had joined the Party as told and then become even more dissatisfied with the Motherland as they learned that the price of advancement was to prostitute one’s mind and soul, to become a highly paid parrot in a blue jacket whose every Party recitation was a grating exercise in self-control.
It was the same as with any large business—the bosses came and went, but the good executive secretaries lasted forever.
And you know the First Rule of Security: The likelihood of a secret’s being blown is proportional to the square of the number of people who’re in on it.”
It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you.
something he had never been but simulated with ease.
but presidents have been known to spoil many carefully laid plans.
With luck a crewman would come down with some obscure malady, and he’d have something interesting to work on for once.
It is a principle of diplomacy,” Pelt observed, “that one must know something of the truth in order to lie convincingly.”
was a loyal Party member and a committed atheist, but he was also a sailor and therefore profoundly superstitious.
He walked away shaking his head angrily, mad at the Russians, embarrassed with himself, wishing he were back at Bethesda where he belonged, and wishing he knew how to swear coherently.
What could possibly go wrong? A thousand things.
It was people like these who had built the American Dream, and people like these who were needed to maintain it.
Well, he decided, that’s what I get from reading Das Kapital in a freshman poli-sci course. It made a lot more sense to look at what Communism built. Garbage, mostly.
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings! Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’” Ryan headed for the washroom, knowing he had to be drunk to quote Shelley.
