Hard to Be a God

by Arkady Strugatsky

There’s no force strong enough to drag them out of their usual range of cares and ideas. You could give them everything. You could put them in the most modern spectroacoustic housing and teach them ionic procedures, and they’d still gather in the kitchen in the evening, playing cards and cackling about the neighbor whose wife wallops him.

Basis theory only concretely specifies the psychological motivations of the principal personality types, but there are in fact as many types as there are people; any sort of person could come to power. For example, take a man who has spent his entire life annoying his neighbors. Spitting into their pots of soup, putting ground glass into their hay. Of course he’ll be removed eventually, but he’ll have plenty of time to spit, to chortle, to make mischief. And it doesn’t matter to him that he won’t make a mark on history, or that distant descendants will rack their brains as they attempt to fit his behavior into an already developed theory of historical progress.

If God undertakes to clean an outhouse, let him not believe that his hands will remain clean.

No country can develop without science—it will be destroyed by its neighbors. Without arts and general culture, the country loses its capacity for self-criticism, begins to encourage faulty tendencies, starts to constantly spawn hypocrites and scum, develops consumerism and conceit in its citizens, and eventually again becomes a victim of its more sensible neighbors.

Somewhere out there, Gur the Storyteller was blindly wandering through empty luxurious apartments, realizing with horror that despite everything, some mysterious pressure caused vivid worlds full of remarkable people and extraordinary feelings to burst into his consciousness out of the depths of his torn, trampled soul. And somewhere out there, God knows how, Doctor Budach was whiling away the night—broken down, brought to his knees, tormented but alive. My brothers, thought Rumata. I’m yours, I’m the flesh of your flesh! He suddenly felt with tremendous force that he was no god, shielding the fireflies of reason with his hands, but instead a brother helping a brother, a son saving a father. I’ll kill Don Reba, he thought.

“Evil is ineradicable. No man is able to decrease its quantity in the world. He can improve his own fate somewhat, but it is always at the expense of the fate of others.

there will always be the ignorant masses, who admire their oppressors and loathe their liberators. And it’s all because a slave has a much better understanding of his master, however brutal, than his liberator, for each slave can easily imagine himself in his master’s place, but few can imagine themselves in the place of a selfless liberator. That’s how people are,

We shouldn’t have illusions. We shouldn’t have hopes for a brighter future. We were being governed by goons and enemies of culture. They will never be with us. They will always be against us. They will never let us say what we believe is right, because what they believe is right is something completely different. And if for us communism is a world of freedom and creativity, for them communism is a society where the people immediately and with pleasure perform all the prescriptions of the party and government.