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“I have always admired businessmen and criminals. How cleverly they react to all sorts of discoveries or events and turn them to their own advantage! Even an eclipse of the sun. When we simple folk hear that one’s coming up soon, we just act dumb and talk about it without seeking any material advantage for ourselves, saying how interesting astronomical phenomena are and how we really ought to watch them. A businessman, though, realizes that people will want to watch the eclipse but they won’t want to go blind in the process. That means they’ll need special glasses, and plenty of them. The businessman gets to work on the glasses, but meanwhile the criminal is already figuring it will be dark during the eclipse, and while the people are gazing up into the sky, they’re sure to lower their guard and forget to keep an eye on their pockets. Or else, let’s say, they’ll go dashing out into the street to observe the eclipse without closing the door to their apartment.”
― Vladimir Voinovich, Monumental Propaganda

“In fact, in Dolgov there were many people with names that had meanings. There was even a period when the town possessed simultaneously a head of police called Tiuryagin (an obvious hint at the word “tiuryaga,â€� or jail), a public prosecutor called Strogii (meaning “strictâ€�) with a deputy who rejoiced in the name of Vorovaty (â€� light-fingeredâ€�!), a judge called Shemyakin (reminiscent of the seventeenth-century hanging judge Shemyaka) and a head of the department of public education called Bogdan Filippovich Nechitailo (a surname which could be interpreted to mean “illiterateâ€�).”
― Vladimir Voinovich, Monumental Propaganda

“The generations are no better or worse than each other; their beliefs, mistakes and behavior depend on the historical and personal circumstances in which they grow up. It doesn’t take a prophet to predict that people will be blinded again, and more than once, by false teaching, will yield to the temptation of endowing certain individuals with superhuman qualities and glorify them, raise them up on a pedestal and then cast them back down again. Later generations will say that they were fools, and yet they will be exactly the same.”
― Vladimir Voinovich, Monumental Propaganda

“Some people in Dolgov, such as Aglaya or even Divanich, couldn’t understand the humane approach taken by the organs. This Shubkin had written an appalling anti-Soviet work and published it in an émigré journal—how could he not be put in jail for that? But there were many things they didn’t understand. For instance, that Shubkin, as we have already noted, was the only one of his kind in the district. If there’d been ten of them, one or two could have been put away. But if you put away the only one, then who would you wage a struggle against?”
― Vladimir Voinovich, Monumental Propaganda

“On learning that the instigators of the uprising had been shot, she was incensed both by the fact that they had been shot at all and the fact that not enough of them had been shot.”
― Vladimir Voinovich, Monumental Propaganda

“[Khrushchev] took a trip to America and spent some time in the state of Iowa. He saw how vigorously the maize grows there and decided that the shortcomings of the collective farm system could be counterbalanced if the expanses from Kushka to the tundra were sown with this magical cereal. One word was all it took, and the entire country was planted with maize. It didn’t grow. They divided the party into agricultural and municipal regional committees. It didn’t grow. They transformed the ministries into national economic councils—NECsâ€� and the maize still didn’t grow; it refused. They gave up on the maize and set about introducing a reform of the Russian language that would have meant a hare was called a “herâ€� and instead of “cucumberâ€� people would have written “queucamber.”
― Vladimir Voinovich, Monumental Propaganda

“They say that was the precise time from which children became less obedient to their parents, discipline in industry deteriorated and the revenue from sales of alcoholic beverages to the public increased, along with the number of abortions and the frequency of violent crimes threatening the lives, honor and property of citizens. Of course, even before then for domestic reasons and on public holidays, the residents of Dolgov had stuck knives in each other, run each other through with pitchforks and beaten each other to death with fence poles, but all that had merely been the observance of old local customs.”
― Vladimir Voinovich, Monumental Propaganda

“Man embarks upon old age unprepared. For as long as childhood, adolescence, youth and maturity last, man dwells on this earth with his own generation, with those who are a little older and a little younger than he is, as if they are all traveling together in one company. At school, at work, in the street, in a meeting, in a shop, in the bathhouse and the movie theater, by and large he always meets the same people–some he knows well, some he knows to say hello to and some he has simply seen somewhere at some time or other. And some are older than he is, some are younger, and yet others are just like him. A man can be imagined as walking along in the middle of a long column: there are still plenty of people ahead of him and people keep joining in behind. The man walks on and on, and suddenly he realizes that he has reached the front and there is no one left ahead of him. There are no more people who are twenty years older, ten years older, five years older, and even most of his contemporaries have died. And no matter which way he turns, everywhere he is the oldest. He looks back over his shoulder and there are many people who are younger, but they have grown up after the man glancing back has already stopped working; he has never associated with them and does not know them. And so it turns out that an old man, although he still has other people around him, is alone. Surrounded by the buzz of other people’s lives. Other people’s ways, passions, interests. And he doesn’t even completely understand the way they speak. And the old man begins to feel as if he has been transported to a foreign country even though he has stayed put in the same place all his life.”
― Vladimir Voinovich, Monumental Propaganda

“A minha vida está justificada, justificada, justificada!, continuou a gritar, sem compreender que a vida, por si só, entrega-se a nós sem nenhum tipo de condição, e não há necessidade de justificá-la por meios especialmente mirabolantes.”
― Vladimir Voinovich, Monumental Propaganda

“<>, continuou a gritar, sem compreender que a vida, por si só, entrega-se a nós sem nenhum tipo de condição, e não há necessidade de justificá-la por meios especialmente mirabolantes.”
― Vladimir Voinovich, Monumental Propaganda