MAXIM GORKY

You must write for children in the same way as you do for adults, only better.

When one loves somebody everything is clear - where to go, what to do - it all takes care of itself and one doesn't have to ask anybody about anything.

Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.

The most beautiful words in the English language are 'not guilty'.

When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid.

When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.

One has to be able to count if only so that at fifty one doesn't marry a girl of twenty.

Only mothers can think of the future - because they give birth to it in their children.

You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know.

Everybody, my friend, everybody lives for something better to come. That's why we want to be considerate of every man - Who knows what's in him, why he was born and what he can do?

What 'jazz' means to me is the worst kind of working conditions, the worst in cultural prejudice. The term 'jazz' has come to mean the abuse and exploitation of black musicians.

Many contemporary authors drink more than they write.

A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains.

There is no one on earth more disgusting and repulsive than he who gives alms. Even as there is no one so miserable as he who accepts them.

Today there's law and order in everything. You can't beat anybody for nothing. If you do beat anyone, it's got to be for the sake of order.

There is no more contemptible poison than power over one's fellow men.

[There should be a] veracious history of all the atrocities and havoc inflicted on our country by its former masters; it must show all the loathsome hatred felt by the beasts of prey who had had their claws cut and their teeth drawn …. It will convince the good-natured and the soft-hearted that a capitalist is no longer a human being, but a creature in which an insane lust for profit has consumed every vestige of humanity. This history must be a record of all the blood shed by the capitalists for the sole purpose of maintaining their accustomed conditions of life, the comfortable, delightful, thoroughly corrupt life of two-legged beasts fattening themselves on other people's strength.

History would have told them [the people] how half-literate priests taught the working people patience and submission to the "authorities appointed by God"; how peasants were made monks by force and monasteries built with their man-power; how the number of "lay parasites" was swollen and brought into being, in which the peasant worked with a plough and his parasite with a spoon. To increase its power and influence over the ignorant people, the church staged flimsy tricks which it called "miracles," from the boyars it created "saints," men of God--all for the benefit of the authorities. The main task of all churches was one and the same: to impress upon the poor serfs that there was no happiness for them on earth; happiness was prepared for them in heaven, and meanwhile back-breaking toil for some other fellow was pleasing in the sight of God.

How shall we live so as to have the consciousness of not having lived in vain?

I declare that the Russian revolution is a cultural and constructive movement, the only movement capable of saving Russia from political dissolution

The conflict against the mean oppression of poverty is a conflict for the liberation of the world from that net of coarse contradictions in which all men are fiercely and impotently struggling

The machine sucked out of men's muscles as much vigor as it needed

What did the workers and peasants gain when power passed from the kings and nobles to the bankers and manufacturers?

Everybody lives for something better to come. That's why we want to be considerate of every man— Who knows what's in him, why he was born and what he can do?

Politics is the soil in which the nettle of poisonous enmity, evil suspicions, shameless lies, slander, morbid ambitions, and disrespect for the individual grows rapidly and luxuriantly. Name anything bad in man and it is precisely in the soil of political struggle that it grows with particular liveliness and abundance.