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The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even — if you will — eccentricity.

— Joseph Brodsky A Commencement Address (1984)

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More quotes by Joseph Brodsky

It is better to be a total failure in democracy than a martyr or the crème de la crème in tyranny.

As you pour yourself a scotch,
crush a roach, or scratch your crotch,
as your hand adjusts your tie, people die.

He’d be a ruin by now, both physically and mentally. Physically because of the bottle. . . . Mentally because of that mixture of impotence and cynicism that corrodes everyone there — the stronger you are the worse it is.

It is the army that finally makes a citizen of you; without it you still have a chance, however slim, to remain a human being.

Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986)

For darkness restores what light cannot repair. There we are married, blest, we make once more the two-backed beast and children are the fair excuse of what we're naked for.

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

One country, one constitution, one destiny.

Daniel Webster

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Joseph Brodsky (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.