Rasputin Quotes

If love were a dolphin with wings and a unicorn’s horn, being ridden by a blind leprechaun dressed like Rasputin, would you believe in second chances for love at first sight?

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious. Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets. The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip... The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies. The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.

There would be no Lenin without Rasputin.

I’m assuming you’re as mystified by this as the rest of us, Rasputin. No. I’m not. I have been planning to destroy the Breakworld since I was a child. [silence] This is why I don’t make so many jokes. I never know when is good.

Gregory Rasputin, his bloodstream filled with poison, his body punctured by bullets, had died by drowning.

He’s like the Rasputin of reapers.

She was to my ego what Rasputin was to morality, whittling away at my self-image with menaces and put downs viewed as compliments until I realised I was too old, too fat, too tall, too dull, too everything to ever find love.

One of those who cooked for Rasputin during the Great War was a chef at Petrograd’s luxurious Astoria Hotel who went on, after the Revolution, to cook for Lenin and Stalin. He was Spiridon Putin, grandfather of President Vladimir Putin.

My voice is raspy, like Rasputin’s beard. My love is like a mustache hidden in a patch of armpit hair. Come, feel what I feel for you.

Miss Rasputin, what a delight to finally meet you,” said the vamp, speaking with only the faintest hint of an accent. “Let’s hope you still feel that way in a few minutes, Mr. Delacroix.” “Pierre, please. And may I call you Evangaline?” Pierre smiled at her winsomely. “No, you may not. My name is Ms. Rasputin to you.” Her answer took the vamp aback, but he recovered quickly and smiled again showing off his small pointed canines. Pierre’s dark eyes flicked over to Ryker in his feline form and he raised an aristocratic brow. “My, what a big pussy you have.” “You know what they say, the bigger the better.

When making his music, he [Elvis Presley] had been the essence of cool, but in his movies he was often a self-parody embarrassing to watch. Colonel Parker, his manager, who had picked movie scrips for him, had served Elvis less well than the monk Rasputin had served Czar Nicholas and Alexandra.

الرب أعطى النقود، والشيطان صنع ثقباً. وها هي نقود الرب تتسرب عبر ثقب الشيطان.

She had found Rasputin to be an odd, intense man. He had been undeniably human and very likely insane, but anyone who could survive reputedly being stabbed, poisoned, shot multiple times, mutilated, and badly beaten before finally drowning, deserved a certain amount of respect.

Rune’s eyes danced and his lean tanned features lit with laughter. “You . . . cooled the meat for me?” “Rasputin cannot eat the chicken when it is too hot,” she said, frowning at him. “It seemed logical that you would not be able to either.

For God’s sake, the man was like Rasputin. Or a cartoon villain who just bounced back after every assault.

I was playing Rasputin and what was motivating him was crumpet really, and I was extremely keen on crumpet so I was really rather good as Rasputin. And my next catastrophic failure was Macbeth, who I played in the style of a crumpet-lover, and then when Doctor Who came along, I embraced this lunacy, this cloud-cuckoo-land where people had to be convinced by absolute nonsense. I came from a very religious background, so it was easy for me to believe in something I knew nothing about.

Quentin Quire: I'm just gonna lay this out there. You're blonde, Russian and exceedingly demonic. How is it that we aren't already dating? . Illyana Rasputin: I would tear you apart, little boy, like the bear does a baby goat.

Gran! Gran?' yelled Jess, racing upstairs. She looked everywhere. Nothing. No aged person. Only Rasputin, looking startled and disapproving. 'Where's Gran, Rasputin? For goodness' sake! Have you eaten her?' cried Jess. Rasputin looked shocked and innocent.

Believe them and they'll tell you all sorts of things.

But Milošević, like Rasputin, refused to die, even as Tony Blair continued his miraculous pilgrim’s progress in search of bigger beasts to bag.

Without Rasputin, there could have been no Lenin.” ALEXANDER KERENSKY

It was like dealing with Rasputin, not a middle-aged woman from Wolverhampton.

هم يضحكون: الكبير(العجوز) مثل الصغير، ويقصدون بذلك أن أحدهما فقد عقله، أما الثاني لم يمتلكه بعد. هذا صحيح، الكبير والصغير هما فقط القادران بحساسية وحدة أن يُدهَشا لوجودهما، ولكل ما يحيط بهما في كل خطوة.

Colossus: The X-Men need me. But as I said... Trance: Yeah, they don't trust you. I got it. Colossus: What would Wolverine do? Trance: He'd team up with a teenage girl and go kill bad guys.

You're afraid of people's judgment…What do you care! People are like dogs; whenever anyone makes a wrong move they set up a holler. They bark and then they stop--and wait for someone else to go wrong.

The box room. No bigger than a coffin. It would be like being buried. Maybe she wouldn't keep her Barbies after all. She would make a huge bonfire in the back garden. She would burn her clothes. She would burn all her old toys (except for her old teddy bear Rasputin, obviously—he was more of a guru and personal trainer than a toy). She would burn her CDs and her CD player. She would burn all her makeup. She would shave all her hair off and burn that. She would wear only a pair of Oriental black pajamas. She would sleep in the box room on a small mat made out of rushes. The only item in the room would be a plain white saucer for her tears. Then they'd be sorry.

The god of unreflecting drunkenness advised me to take no reading matter at all, or if I absolutely insisted on reading matter, then a little stack of Rasputin would do; Apollo, on the other hand, in his shrewd, sensible way, tried to talk me out of this trip to France altogether, but when he saw that Oskar's mind was made up, insisted on proper baggage; very well, I would have to take the highly respectable yawn that Goethe had yawned so long ago, but for spite, and also because I knew that The Elective Affinities would never solve all my sexual problems, I also took Rasputin and his naked women, naked but for their black stockings. If Apollo strove for harmony and Dionysus for drunkenness and chaos, Oskar was a little demigod whose business it was to harmonize chaos and intoxicate reason. In addition to his mortality, he had one advantage over all the full divinities whose characters and careers had been established in the remote past: Oskar could read what he pleased whereas the gods censored themselves.

قل للأحمق أن يصلي,فسيحطم رأسه من كثرة السجود.

...sometime when your life is so good, you'll want to make your happiness as simple as possible.

There is no such thing as fear,” Rasputin replied. “Emotions are just energy and motion that you trap inside your body because of a thought.” Mini-Clark

To separate Rasputin from his mythology, I came to realize, was to completely misunderstand him. There is no Rasputin without the stories about Rasputin.

He now filled the role of Czar Nicholas II to his so-called uncle’s Rasputin,

Huey Long, Rasputin, Sir Basil Zaharoff, Milton, London, Nietzsche, Capone and other “de facto Satanists” who practiced or wrote of rational self-interest, became LaVey’s primary teachers.

Vladimir Putin had once been known as Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Dracula. And that he had also, in fact, been Grigori Rasputin before the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The comparison of Rasputin and Christ was customary in that circle, and by no means accidental. The alarm of the royal couple before the menacing forces of history was too sharp to be satisfied with an impersonal God and the futile shadow of a Biblical Christ. They needed a second coming of “the Son of Man.” In Rasputin the rejected and agonizing monarchy found a Christ in its own image. “If there had been no Rasputin,” said Senator Tagantsev, a man of the old regime, “it would have been necessary to invent one.” There is a good deal more in these words than their author imagined.

The widespread joy that greeted Rasputin’s assassination confused me. No matter what crimes the starets had committed, I was not accustomed to the idea of rejoicing at a man’s death, even less at his murder.

The mysterious healer was a strannik – a semi-literate, thirty-seven-year-old lay pilgrim – named Grigory Rasputin, who had been gaining a reputation in St Petersburg as a mystic and healer since his arrival there during Lent 1903.

What was so wrong with us? We were young, healthy, matched in every way. Live and be happy. No, I had to show my strength, be moody. What a fool. And I didn't understand that I was a fool; after all, I do have some brains, but I couldn't stop myself.

THE BEET IS THE MOST INTENSE of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious. Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets. The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip . . . The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies. The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes. In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is mangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t——. Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic asshole—and when you aren't sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.) An old Ukrainian proverb warns, “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil.” That is a risk we have to take.

It's sad to wander about the graveyard of my tired memory, where all hurts have been forgiven, where every sin has been more that atoned for, every riddle unriddled and twilight quietly cloaks the crosses, now no longer upright, of graves I once wept over.

One frequent visitor, an opera singer, often rang up Rasputin simply to sing to him his favorite songs over the telephone. Taking the telephone, Rasputin danced around the room, holding the earpiece to his ear. At the table, Rasputin stroked the arms and hair of the women sitting next to him.

mind was impure and his moral behavior was gross. But he had in lavish abundance some of the dramatic trappings of holiness. Along with his burning eyes, he had a fluent tongue. His head was filled with Scriptures, and his deep, powerful voice made him a compelling preacher. Besides, he had wandered the length and breadth of Russia and twice made pilgrimages to the Holy Land. He presented himself as a humble penitent, a man who had sinned greatly, been forgiven and commanded to do God’s work. It was a touching symbol of his humility, people said, that he kept the nickname “Rasputin” which he had earned as a young man in his native village. “Rasputin” in Russian means “dissolute.

Let others do as they wished, but she would live the life she began and would not run from corner to corner in a frenzy. She would wait for her own happiness, not someone else's.

I don't know how it is in mathematics, but in life the best proof for something lies in its opposite.

Paras nukkua... Paeta tätä järjetöntä ja rikoksentäyteistä elämää joka nieli nuoruuteni...

Minä olen tuhkimus! Raivoisa tuhkimus!

If you're being swept away, off somewhere, then why count the pebbles on the shore; they're on the shore, after all.

It's still not tea without a samovar. Just water, that's all.

Of course, drinking is an art, like lots of other things.

She had to live a long and wretched life to admit to herself at its end that she hadn't understood anything about it.

Believe them and they'll you all sorts of things.

Lately, Nastoyna felt that she had no right to criticize anyone at all -- no man, no animal, no bird, because each lived his own life, which was not in his control and which he could not change.

Perhaps the most important thing in life is for each person to stay headed in the right direction within his assigned place and not to veer off in vain or run around in circles on ill-defined quests.

Let them, let them scratch where it itches, it's a real human itch to gossip, to go over someone's bones until they're picked clean. They can't live without it. And you just keep quiet, do your work, and don't taunt them--they'll stop sooner. And then it'll be someone else's turn, and you'll be with the others again. Is this the first time? The very thing they blame you for, they'll praise you for later. People…

Sometime after midnight, another band of soldiers broke into the tiny chapel in the Imperial Park which had become Rasputin’s tomb and exhumed the coffin. They took it to a clearing in the forest, pried off the lid and, using sticks to avoid touching the putrefying corpse, lifted what remained of Rasputin onto a pile of pine logs. The body and logs were drenched with gasoline and set on fire. For more than six hours, the body burned while an icy wind howled through the clearing and clouds of pungent smoke rose from the pyre. Along with the soldiers, a group of peasants gathered, silent and afraid, to watch through the night as the final scene of this baleful drama was played. It had happened as Rasputin once predicted: he would be killed and his body not left in peace, but burned, with his ashes scattered to the winds.

Everything, that she was saying, now, everything that she saw and heard, took place in a deep numbness, in which all the senses are stilled and a person exists not in one's own life but with some emergency life that is stuck onto one. In such situations fear, pain, surprise and enlightenment come later, and until such time as one comes to one's senses, this sober, sturdy, and almost unfeeling mechanism takes over.

I saw and heard all sorts of things in my fever; I was riding a merry-go-round, I wanted to get off but I couldn’t. I was one of many little children sitting in fire engines and hollowed-out swans, on dogs, cats, pigs, and stags, riding round and round. I wanted to get off but I wasn’t allowed to. All the little children were crying, like me they wanted to get out of the fire engines and hollowed-out swans, down from the backs of the cats, dogs, pigs, and stags, they didn’t want to ride on the merry-go-round any more, but they weren’t allowed to get off. The Heavenly Father was standing beside the merry-go-round and every time it stopped, he paid for another turn. And we prayed: “Oh, our Father who art in heaven, we know you have lots of loose change, we know you like to treat us to rides on the merry-go-round, we know you like to prove to us that this world is round. Please put your pocket-book away, say stop, finished, fertig, basta, stoi, closing time—we poor little children are dizzy, they’ve brought us, four thousand of us, to K"asemark on the Vistula, but we can’t get across, because your merry-go-round, your merry-go-round…” But God our Father, the merry-go-round owner, smiled in his most benevolent manner and another coin came sailing out of his purse to make the merry-go-round keep on turning, carrying four thousand children with Oskar in their midst, in fire engines and hollowed-out swans, on cats, dogs, pigs, and stags, round and round in a ring, and every time my stag—I’m still quite sure it was a stag—carried us past our Father in heaven, the merry-go-round owner, he had a different face: He was Rasputin, laughing and biting the coin for the next ride with his faith healer’s teeth; and then he was Goethe, the poet prince, holding a beautifully embroidered purse, and the coins he took out of it were all stamped with his father-in-heaven profile; and then again Rasputin, tipsy, and again Herr von Goethe, sober. A bit of madness with Rasputin and a bit of rationality with Goethe. The extremists with Rasputin, the forces of order with Goethe.

Red meat isn’t a chemical. What is it about the red meat? The meat? The red? To be fair to the authors, they also studied white meat which was mostly beneficial. But what about potatoes? Cupcakes? Breakfast cereal? Are these completely neutral? If we ran these through the same computer, what would we see? Unspoken, in everybody’s mind is saturated fat, that Rasputin of nutritional risk factors who will come after you despite enough bullets in its body to have killed several scientific theories.

Rasputin, returning to his village on June 27, had been followed there without his knowledge by Khina Gusseva, Iliodor’s agent. Gusseva caught the starets alone in a village street. She accosted him and, when he turned, drove Iliodor’s knife deep into his stomach. “I have killed the Antichrist,” she screamed hysterically and then attempted unsuccessfully to stab herself. Rasputin was gravely hurt; the slash in his stomach had exposed his entrails. He was taken to a hospital in Tyumen, where a specialist sent by his friends in St. Petersburg performed an operation.

But before the year was out, Oldfield was plotting with the Queensland renegade Pauline Hanson to set up her new party. This emerged only after he left Abbott’s office in April 1997 armed with a glowing reference from the member for Warringah. A humiliated Abbott blasted Oldfield: “He’s a dangerous, snaky Rasputin who thrives on notoriety. Sure, I had him on my staff when I knew he held some unnaturally intense views on some things, but he seemed like a Liberal with a reasonable standing in the community. I’m not making any big claims for myself, but even Jesus had his Judas.

Ти мислиш да я вземеш,момичето де,като кифла и да я изядеш.Що за любов е това?Макар че,наистина и такава любов има.Но ти се опитай да я обичаш по друг начин.Отдръпни се на една крачка и я обичай.Остави пролука за Бога-да застане между вас. А може би и за дявола ... Може в пролуката да се окаже не Бог,а дяволът.

It is certainly clear that despite being a man of religion, Rasputin was also a shrewd opportunist, nor did he ever make any attempt to hide his physical appetites. On arriving in the capital, he did the rounds of the salons of a fin-de-siècle St Petersburg noted for its decadence, pandering to rich society ladies who dabbled in the then-fashionable cults of faith healing, table turning and eastern mysticism, and built a following among them. He was, for his detractors, an easy personality to caricature in his loose peasant blouse and long boots, with his heavy frame, his long oily black hair and beard, and his coarse bulging lips.

There isn’t a person alive who would opt for Rasputin’s bloodletting techniques over the cutting-edge therapies at Sloan Kettering. And yet so many insist we believe these stories and then have the audacity to insist others believe them, too.” “You make a fair point, Evans,” Wakely wrote back. “But people need to believe in something bigger than themselves.” “Why?” Calvin pressed. “What’s wrong with believing in ourselves? Anyway, if stories must be used, why not rely on a fable or fairy tale? Aren’t they just as valid a vehicle for teaching morality? Except maybe better? Because no one has to pretend to believe that the fables and tales are true?

Ilya Kovylin, a Moscow merchant born in 1731 and one of the founders of the Old Believer sect of the Fedoseevtsy, taught his followers that “without sin there is no repentance, without repentance no salvation. There will be many sinners in heaven.” It was Kovylin who coined the famous (or infamous) phrase “If you don’t sin, you don’t repent, if you don’t repent, you can’t be saved.” This Kovylin is immensely important, for his words have mistakenly been attributed to Rasputin, as if he spoke them first, having himself created some new perversion, when in fact they have a much older tradition and represent an idea shared by various sectarian groups.

It pained Maria Fyodorovna to watch how her daughter-in-law dominated her son. Nicholas never once mentioned Rasputin in any of his letters to his mother. The subject for him was taboo. His mother wept: “My poor daughter-in-law does not perceive that she is ruining the dynasty and herself. She sincerely believes in the holiness of an adventurer, and we are powerless to ward off the misfortune, which is sure to come.” It was possible she was then recalling that upon her arrival in Russia from her homeland of Denmark in 1866, an old woman had foretold that her son would rule over Russia with great wealth and power, only to be cut down by “a moujik’s hand.”13

But isn’t there more solace in science?” Calvin responded. “In things we can prove and therefore work to improve? I just don’t understand how anyone thinks anything written ages ago by drunk people is even remotely believable. And I’m not making a moral judgment here: those people had to drink, the water was bad. Still, I ask myself how their wild stories—bushes burning, bread dropping from heaven—seem reasonable, especially when compared to evidence-based science. There isn’t a person alive who would opt for Rasputin’s bloodletting techniques over the cutting-edge therapies at Sloan Kettering. And yet so many insist we believe these stories and then have the audacity to insist others believe them, too.

John Belushi embodied Gonzo in its rawest form. It was no accident that he had an intense friendship with the Prince of Gonzo himself, Hunter Thompson—Thompson once said that John was more fun in twenty minutes than most people were in twenty years. Neither was it a coincidence that Belushi did a superb imitation of Marlon Brando, the original Wild One. Like Brando, John didn’t seem to act his emotions onstage so much as exorcise them. Many of his strongest characters—the Samurai Warrior, Rasputin, the demon child Damien—spoke no words at all. Belushi breathed them to life on the power of sheer presence, and, strangely, it is the power of sheer presence that transmits best through the tubes and transistors of television.

How many people, healthy and strong do not distinguish their own, personal, God-given feelings from the common, dime-a-dozen feelings. Those people get into bed with the same unbridled pleasure, ready for anything, that they sit at a table with: just to be satisfied. And they cry and laugh looking around--to make sure that they are seen laughing and crying so that their tears do not go to waste. They were played out: touch them a special way--and they won't understand, they won't respond, not a single string will vibrate with a sensitive quiver. It's too late for them--they are deaf and dumb, and they will never touch anyone that way either. And all because they did not want or did not know how to be alone with themselves, they had forgotten and lost themselves, and now they couldn't remember or find themselves.

But isn’t there more solace in science?” Calvin responded. “In things we can prove and therefore work to improve? I just don’t understand how anyone thinks anything written ages ago by drunk people is even remotely believable. And I’m not making a moral judgment here: those people had to drink, the water was bad. Still, I ask myself how their wild stories—bushes burning, bread dropping from heaven—seem reasonable, especially when compared to evidence-based science. There isn’t a person alive who would opt for Rasputin’s bloodletting techniques over the cutting-edge therapies at Sloan Kettering. And yet so many insist we believe these stories and then have the audacity to insist others believe them, too.” “You make a fair point, Evans,” Wakely wrote back. “But people need to believe in something bigger than themselves.

declared that he had been directed to make a pilgrimage. His father scoffed—“Gregory has turned pilgrim out of laziness,” said Efim—but Gregory set out and walked two thousand miles to the monastery at Mount Athos in Greece. At the end of two years, when Gregory returned, he carried an aura of mystery and holiness. He began to pray at length, to bless other peasants, to kneel at their beds in supplication when they were sick. He gave up his drinking and curbed his public lunges at women. It began to be said that Gregory Rasputin, the profligate, was a man who was close to God. The village priest, alarmed at this sudden blossoming of a vigorous young Holy Man within his sphere, suggested heresy and threatened an investigation. Unwilling to argue and bored by life in Pokrovskoe, Rasputin left the village and began once again to wander.

During the march an orderly came to inform me that General Krymov, who was marching at the head of our column, wanted me. I found him with our General Staff near a wood-house, busily reading a letter which had just come. Whilst I was still some way off he called out to me: "Great news! At last they've killed that scoundrel Rasputin!" The newspapers announced the bare fact, letters from the capital gave the details. Of the three assassins, I knew two intimately: the Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovitch and Prince Youssoupoff. What had been their motive? Why, having killed a man whom they regarded as a menace to the country, had they not admitted their action before everyone? Why had they not relied on justice and public opinion instead of trying to hide all trace of the murder by burying the body under the ice? We thought over the news with great anxiety.

If it is medically possible that Rasputin could have controlled Alexis’s bleeding by using hypnosis, it is far from historically certain that he did. Stephen Beletsky, Director of the Police Department, which monitored all Rasputin’s activities, declared that in 1913 Rasputin was taking lessons in hypnotism from a teacher in St. Petersburg; Beletsky put an end to the lessons by expelling the teacher from the capital. Rasputin’s successes with Alexis, however, began well before 1913. If he had been using hypnosis all the while, why did he need lessons? The probable answer to this mystery derives from recent explorations into the shadowy links between the working of mind and body and between emotions and health. In hematology, for example, it has been proved that bleeding in hemophiliacs can be aggravated or even spontaneously induced by emotional stress. Anger, anxiety, resentment and embarrassment cause an increase in blood flow through the smallest blood vessels, the capillaries. In addition, there is evidence that overwrought emotions can adversely affect the strength and integrity of the capillary walls.

En aquella misma época Rasputín empezó a hacer recomendaciones graciosas a los zares. "Encuentra que deberías ordenar a las faktorías [fábricas] que fabricasen municiones, simplemente tú da la orden; incluso elegir qué faktoría, si te muestran una lista [...]. Sé más autocrático, Cariño mío, muestra tu voluntad (14/06/1915). Es curioso, pero Rasputín sugería medidas que recuerdan al imperio bolchevique de los tiempos de Stalin, que durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial convirtió, con mano de hierro, todas las fábricas para suplir las necesidades del frente. Rasputín propondría lo mismo: "29 de agosto de 1915 [...] Pero Nuestro Amigo cree que más fábricas deberían hacer munición, además de las mercancías que producen". ¡Y el zar trataba de llevar a cabo tales sugerencias! Junto con la nacionalización y la militarización de las fábricas, se efectuó la expropiación obligatoria de los productos alimenticios de los campesinos y terratenientes. Se hacía todo lo que aconsejaba Rasputín. [...] Algunas de las medidas que fueron instituidas durante el comunismo de guerra después de la Revolución, de hecho ya habían sido propuestas antes de Lenin por el campesino ruso Grigori Rasputín. Y llevadas a cabo por el último zar.

Why do you think so many people believe in texts written thousands of years ago? And why does it seem the more supernatural, unprovable, improbable, and ancient the source of these texts, the more people believe them?” “Humans need reassurance,” Wakely wrote back. “They need to know others survived the hard times. And, unlike other species, which do a better job of learning from their mistakes, humans require constant threats and reminders to be nice. You know how we say, ‘People never learn?’ It’s because they never do. But religious texts try to keep them on track.” “But isn’t there more solace in science?” Calvin responded. “In things we can prove and therefore work to improve? I just don’t understand how anyone thinks anything written ages ago by drunk people is even remotely believable. And I’m not making a moral judgment here: those people had to drink, the water was bad. Still, I ask myself how their wild stories—bushes burning, bread dropping from heaven—seem reasonable, especially when compared to evidence-based science. There isn’t a person alive who would opt for Rasputin’s bloodletting techniques over the cutting-edge therapies at Sloan Kettering. And yet so many insist we believe these stories and then have the audacity to insist others believe them, too.

Poco antes de su muerte, el campesino había empezado a hablar con la zarina de un aumento de "la paga a todos los oficiales pobres del país" para reforzar la maquinaria del Estado en tiempos difíciles. Su idea de cómo obtener el dinero para ello suena divertida en boca de la zarina de Rusia: "siempre se puede obtener dinero de algunos capitales", escribiría Alix a su marido el 25 de septiembre de 1916. Es decir, simplemente apoderarse del dinero de los ricos. Aquel antiguo sueño campesino también sería puesto en práctica por los bolcheviques. No era ninguna casualidad que Bonch-Bruévich, el futuro amigo íntimo de Lenin, camarada de armas y fundador de la sangrienta Checa, se mostrara en sus artículos encantado con el "inteligente e ingenioso campesino". [...] Para poner a prueba su "don de conocer a la gente", Bonch-Bruévich mostró a Rasputín un retrato de cierta persona querida. Al ver el retrato, escribió Bonch-Bruévich: "Rasputín se puso muy nervioso. "¿Quién es? Dime, ¿quién es?". Se precipitó hacia la pared de donde colgaba el cuadro en el que estaba pintado el rostro orgulloso e inteligente de un hombre mayor. "¡Bueno, es alguien importante! ¡Dios mío! ¡Es un Sansón, amigo mío, un verdadero Sansón, sí señor! ¡Preséntamelo! ¡Iremos a verle ahora mismo! ¡Es alguien a quien deberían seguir regimientos enteros!" Y Rasputín se apresuró a encender una luz eléctrica que había junto al cuadro para poder observar mejor la cara de aquel hombre extraordinario. Le dije que se trataba de Karl Marx".

FACT 4 – There is more to the creation of the Manson Family and their direction than has yet been exposed. There is more to the making of the movie Gimme Shelter than has been explained. This saga has interlocking links to all the beautiful people Robert Hall knew. The Manson Family and the Hell’s Angels were instruments to turn on enemy forces. They attacked and discredited politically active American youth who had dropped out of the establishment. The violence came down from neo-Nazis, adorned with Swastikas both in L.A. and in the Bay Area at Altamont. The blame was placed on persons not even associated with the violence. When it was all over, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the icing on this cake, famed musicians associated with a racist, neo-Nazi murder. By rearranging the facts, cutting here and there, distorting evidence, neighbors and family feared their own youth. Charles Manson made the cover of Life with those wide eyes, like Rasputin. Charles Watson didn’t make the cover. Why not? He participated in all the killings. Manson wasn’t inside the house. Manson played a guitar and made records. Watson didn’t. He was too busy taking care of matters at the lawyer’s office prior to the killings, or with officials of Young Republicans. Who were Watson’s sponsors in Texas, where he remained until his trial, separate from the Manson Family’s to psychologically distance him from the linking of Watson to the murders he actually committed. “Pigs” was scrawled in Sharon Tate’s house in blood. Was this to make blacks the suspects? Credit cards of the La Bianca family were dropped intentionally in the ghetto after the massacre. The purpose was to stir racial fears and hatred. Who wrote the article, “Did Hate Kill Tate?”—blaming Black Panthers for the murders? Lee Harvey Oswald was passed off as a Marxist. Another deception. A pair of glasses was left on the floor of Sharon Tate’s home the day of the murder. They were never identified. Who moved the bodies after the killers left, before the police arrived? The Spahn ranch wasn’t a hippie commune. It bordered the Krupp ranch, and has been incorporated into a German Bavarian beer garden. Howard Hughes knew George Spahn. He visited this ranch daily while filming The Outlaw. Howard Hughes bought the 516 acres of Krupp property in Nevada after he moved into that territory. What about Altamont? What distortions and untruths are displayed in that movie? Why did Mick Jagger insist, “the concert must go on?” There was a demand that filmmakers be allowed to catch this concert. It couldn’t have happened the same in any other state. The Hell’s Angels had a long working relationship with law enforcement, particularly in the Oakland area. They were considered heroes by the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers when they physically assaulted the dirty anti-war hippies protesting the shipment of arms to Vietnam. The laboratory for choice LSD, the kind sent to England for the Stones, came from the Bay Area and would be consumed readily by this crowd. Attendees of the concert said there was “a compulsiveness to the event.” It had to take place. Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby’s lawyer, made the legal arrangements. Ruby had complained that Belli prohibited him from telling the full story of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder (another media event). There were many layers of cover-up, and many names have reappeared in subsequent scripts. Sen. Philip Hart, a member of the committee investigating illegal intelligence operations inside the US, confessed that his own children told him these things were happening. He had refused to believe them. On November 18, 1975, Sen. Hart realized matters were not only out of hand, but crimes of the past had to be exposed to prevent future outrages. How shall we ensure that it will never happen again? It will happen repeatedly unless we can bring ourselves to understand and accept that it did go on.

What do we mean by individuality? It is a unified plurality, an enlargement of one's possibilities and their subordination to the principal purpose that determines all. Without a purpose, individuality does not exist.

On the contrary, good deed is altruistic and confident of its own quiet but wonder-working power. And if, after many years, a person's past good deed comes back to him from a different quarter, this means it has made the rounds of that many more people and the circle of its effect has grown that much wider.

There is such a thing as a person's spiritual memory, his spiritual experience, which must be present in each of us, regardless of our age. These are the main things, of a seemingly higher realm, that gives us moral momentum, that we derive from the events of our lives, and that hold interest not only for ourselves alone. When this occurs and when the moral residue of external events seems important to us, we naturally want to share it with others.

Isn't it odd? Why do we always feel just as guilty when we think of our teachers as when we think of our parents? And not because of anything that happened at school -- no, not at all. It's because of what became of us later.

A person gets old not when he reaches old age, but, when he stops being a child.

How can anyone not drink?...Is anyone fool enough not to want to feel good? The day you have a drink's always like a holiday. If you only know when to stop.

It wasn't that easy to leave your established home, the place made sacred by the graves of your parents, and move on to who knew where.

They're clinking glasses and knocking it back to their hearts' content. Tastes so good they can't stop. Ain't you heard the old saying: 'Money comes from God and the Devil collects it?' Well, the Devil's collecting his share now.

Hunger, when there is something to cure it with, is easy to cure.

As the soil was renewed, so one's feelings seemed to change, uniting in some inexplicable way with a distant age when the eyes and ears of men were more alert to sights, sounds, and fine distinctions.

There is something in a man's fate that has eyes that remember whether he has someone to come home to or not.

Lots of things happen in a woman's body, and nothing works exactly on schedule.

Why are you taking away my last hope that I had lived to some purpose?

This is everything for me, my only service in life. And let people not know, but my blood will know that he's mine. Only our blood remembers us anyway.

Don't listen to people--listen to yourself.

Life was not a piece of clothing that could be changed ten times. What there is, is all yours, and it's wrong to refuse any of it, even the very worst.

Take everything that's yours with you, don't save any -- it won't be needed later.

When everything is fine, it's easy to be together: it's like a dream, all you have to worry about is breathing and the rest takes care of itself. You have to be together when things are bad -- that's why people get married.

I might have wanted another destiny for myself, but others have theirs, and I have mine. And I'm not sorry about it. It's mine.

You have to think ahead, if you want to live, look around to see what you have, what to use to begin your new life.

The person who does a truly good deed does not remember it as long as does the person for whom it is done. And this is how it ought to be. A truly good deed, by definition, is not done with the expectation of instant return ("I scratched your back, now you scratch mine!").

And here, like everything else, life changed from a whole number into a fraction with a numerator and a denominator, and it became difficult to figure out what was above the line and what was below it

Life was life so that it could go on, it could take everything and survive anywhere, even on bare rock or shifting sands, and if necessary, even under water, but why torture it this way for no good reason, creating totally unnecessary difficulties for people, why worry about small conveniences and create major inconveniences?

Everything that happens is for the best, so that life is happier and more interesting. Just live without looking around or thinking.