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Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940 - January 28, 1996), born Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky was a Russian poet and essayist who won the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature and was Poet Laureate of the United States from 1991 to 1992

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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.

– Joseph Brodsky

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If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

– Joseph Brodsky

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Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?

– Joseph Brodsky

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Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

– Joseph Brodsky

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How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

– Joseph Brodsky

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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.

– Joseph Brodsky

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In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they're not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature. What they're doing is simply talking back to the language itself --as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony --those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it's something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a read, commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself.

– Joseph Brodsky

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It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.

– Joseph Brodsky

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

– Joseph Brodsky

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

– Joseph Brodsky

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The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.

– Joseph Brodsky

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The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even -- if you will -- eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with.

– Joseph Brodsky

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What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

– Joseph Brodsky

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What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.

– Joseph Brodsky

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