Valentin Nicolae > Valentin's Quotes

“And the boat and the dock and the gravel on the shore, the trees sky-pointed or crouching, leaning out over the water, the complicated profile of surrounding islands and dim yet distinct mountains, seemed to exist in a natural confusion, more extravagant and yet more ordinary than anything I could dream or invent. Like a place that will go on existing whether you are there or not, and that in fact is still there.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman: Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

“banks were ‘international in life, but national in death’.”
― Martin Wolf, The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--and Have Still to Learn--from the Financial Crisis

“In a country supposedly dedicated to the ideals of market economics, arguably the most important social function of finance – lending for home purchase – had become almost completely nationalized.”
― Martin Wolf, The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--and Have Still to Learn--from the Financial Crisis

“Governments had socialized the liabilities of the core institutions of the global financial system.”
― Martin Wolf, The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--and Have Still to Learn--from the Financial Crisis

“the anti-Semitic Moldavian Pavalаchii Cruseveanu (b. 1860). Known as Pavel Krushevan, he not only oversaw the text’s compilation in 1902–3 but instigated the major pogrom in Kishenëv (Chişinau) in 1903 and founded the Bessarabian branch of the Union of the Russian People in 1905.53”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“could serve as a political elixir: everything that went awry could be, and was, blamed on the Jews.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Sergei Kryzhanovsky, who handled the disbursements to the Union of Russian People and similar organizations, saw no distinction between the political techniques and social program of the far right—redistribution of private property from plutocrats to the poor—and”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“okhranka operatives deemed the far right’s leaders “uncultured” and “unreliable” and kept them under close surveillance, with good reason.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Many rightist movements, refraining from hyperinflammatory rhetoric or arming vigilante “brotherhoods” to combat leftists and Jews and assassinate public figures, were considerably less volatile than the Union of the Russian People.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Stolypin, frowned on the public “disorder” of political mobilization, and wanted politics to return from the street to the corridors of power.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Most rightists wanted an autocracy without asterisk—that is, a mystical unity of monarch and folk—and they rejected anything more than a consultative Duma, but the autocrat himself had created the Duma. This”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“For some, including Nicholas II, the mere existence of a prime minister was an affront to autocracy.63”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“In the two weeks before the first Duma opened, between April 10 and 25, 1906, the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party convoked its 4th Congress under the slogan of “unity.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“he boldly rejected the Bolshevik Lenin’s proposal for complete land nationalization as well as a Russian Menshevik call for land municipalization.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Land redistribution, Jughashvili argued, would facilitate a worker-peasant alliance,”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“The goal of the cobbler, Jughashvili continued, without mentioning his father, Beso, by name, was to accumulate capital and reopen his own business. But eventually, the “petit-bourgeois” cobbler realized he would never accumulate the capital and was in fact a proletarian. “A change in the consciousness of the cobbler,” Jughashvili concluded, “followed a change in his material circumstances.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“the congress had been dominated by Mensheviks, many of whom were Jews. “It wouldn’t hurt,” he wrote in the report, recalling another Bolshevik’s remarks at the congress, “for us Bolsheviks to organize a pogrom in the party.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Even skeptical emigres clued in to OGPU methods wanted to believe their homeland could somehow be seized back from the godless, barbaric Bolsheviks, and speculated endlessly about a Napoleon figure to lead a patriotic movement, mentioning most often Mikhail Tukhachevsky:”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Trotsky cut in: “‘Collective leadership’ is precisely when everyone hinders each other or everyone attacks each other.’ (Laughter).”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“to the Georgian, pointed his finger and exclaimed, “The first secretary poses his candidacy to the post of grave digger of the revolution!”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Bolshevik socialism (anticapitalism) attracted and gave meaning to the shock-troop activists, supplied the vocabulary and worldview of millions in the party and beyond, and achieved a monopoly over the public sphere, but this same politically empowering ideology afforded no traction over the international situation or the faltering quasi-market domestic economy.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Hungary shares more than it may like to admit with its former Warsaw Pact allies Romania and Bulgaria. Fischer explained that despite its economic progress, Hungary still cannot easily escape its past:”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Eastward to Tartary

“Pope who announced his intention to transform the cultured silk-brocaded propriety of the Rome of Pope Benedict XVI into ‘a poor Church, for the poor’.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“He has opposed same-sex marriage and gay adoption but he has kissed the feet of homosexuals with Aids.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“When a pope dies, cardinals from all over the world collect in the Vatican and begin to meet in what they call General Congregations. In April 2005 the first few days of these meetings were spent in absorbing the implications of the death of the man the Vatican swiftly dubbed John Paul the Great. Santo Subito, the crowds in St Peter’s Square had cried: Make him a Saint Now!”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“And conservatives and moderates alike could respect his keen pastoral sense and his personal frugality – a Prince of the Church who had given up a grand archbishop’s palace for a simple apartment in his episcopal office-block, who cooked his own meals and eschewed a chauffeur-driven limousine in favour of taking the subway and the bus. He was also a man of deep prayer.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“Through a spokesman he told Newsweek Argentina of his ‘unhappiness’ with Benedict’s words. ‘Pope Benedict’s statement doesn’t reflect my own opinions,’ the Archbishop of Buenos Aires declared. ‘These statements will serve to destroy in 20 seconds the careful construction of a relationship with Islam that Pope John Paul II built over the last twenty years.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“He was similarly unimpressed with Benedict’s 2009 decision to lift the excommunication of four schismatic Lefebvrists bishops of the Society of Pius X – one of whom, Bishop Richard Williamson, turned out persistently to insist that millions of Jews were not gassed in Nazi concentration camps.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“The Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires was altogether more robust. He went out of his way to preface his position by insisting that there is no connection between celibacy and paedophilia. ‘There are psychological perversions that existed prior to choosing a life of celibacy,’ he said. ‘If a priest is a paedophile, he is so before he becomes a priest.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“Church attempts to cover up the problem were both wrong and counter-productive, he believes. ‘I do not believe in the positions that some hold about sustaining a certain corporate spirit so as to avoid damaging the image of the institution,’ he said.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots