Joseph Brodsky

Iosip Aleksandrovich Brodsky, (Russian:Ио́сиф Алекса́ндрович Бро́дский, better known as Joseph Brodsky) (24 May 1940 – 28 January 1996), was a Russian-American poet, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature, and Poet Laureate of the United States for 1991-1992.

Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986)

• There was Lenin, looking like a cherub in his blonde curls. Then Lenin in his twenties and thirties, bald and uptight.

• This is just one example of the trimming of the self that — along with the language itself, where verbs and nouns changed places as freely as one dare to have them do so — bred in us such an overpowering sense of ambivalence that in ten years we ended up with a willpower in no way superior to a seaweed’s.

• There isn’t an executioner who isn’t scared of turning victim one day, nor is there the sorriest victim who would not acknowledge (if only to himself) a mental ability to become an executioner.

Unsourced

• The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.

• There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

• Unbelief is blindness, but more often piggishness.