Joseph Brodsky Quotes

For aesthetics is the mother of ethics. Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe-not empirically, alas, but only theoretically-that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.

No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there-well or poorly.

I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change-within himself, not on the outside.

Life-the way it really is-is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.