Alexander Zinoviev

“When it comes to destroying and humiliating Russian geniuses, the West and the Soviet Union are one. p. 103”

“To fully feel Western freedom, one must lose all hope of losing freedom. For the Russian, Western freedom is above all solitude. p. 89”

“To enjoy freedom, you need money p. 89”

“The forms of preparation for war are varied. They are divided above all into capitalist forms and socialist forms. [...] The capitalists hide their capital in Swiss banks, and our compatriots in woolen stockings. The capitalists monopolize paintings by old masters for millions of dollars, our compatriots buy soap and sugar for a few kopecks... p. 36”

“The problem is not the lack of freedom, it is on the contrary the excess of freedom! We're stuffed with it! (p. 36)”

“To feel life, to truly experience it, you must, of course, be in it. But to know it, it is necessary, above all, to move away from it at a sufficient distance. Otherwise, you have no overall vision, you cannot distinguish its essential features, its dynamics, its aims. 397”

“It is, in principle, impossible to understand our life and our mental functioning if we are not a dialectician. However, dialectics is fundamentally foreign to Western man, whether he is a “thinker” or not. p. 353”

“The one-party system does not come from an error or bad design, it is, on the contrary, perfectly normal, because our society does not have ONE party, it is WITHOUT a party. p. 115-116”

“A pluralist system under a communist regime is an absurdity. The parties would immediately go to war, and one of them would win (or the country would divide into “independent” states). p. 115”

“The Party is the organization of leaders, in the strongest sense of the term and for leaders of all orders. It is, fundamentally, an organ of repression, and not just the place of production of slogans and speeches. Our party is not one, in the sense in which it was understood before the revolution, or in the Western sense of the term. It only has the name. It's not the party, it's the Party. And its role is quite different in the life of society (it is power, privileges). p. 115”

“The whole problem, currently, is to have a method of understanding, says the Fool. People have information in spades, but they are incapable of extracting truths that matter. They are content to live at a superficial level of very primary observation and generalization. No one is capable of deepening their analysis to the essential mechanisms of what is happening. However, such deepening obeys rules, which are not very complicated. 117”

“This is only a description of the facts. However, this is not the truth, since there will undoubtedly be other facts whose description will contradict this one. The truth is not in the juxtaposition of this type of writing. What opposes the truth is not another truth, but error. p. 89”

“La Maison jaune, Alexandre Zinoviev (trad. Anne Coldefy-Faucard et Wladimir Berelowitch), éd. Julliard/L'Age d'Homme, 1982, en 2 tomes”

“Which means that we are seriously mistaken when we hope to see science play a role as an instrument of progress and civilization.”

“The scientific spirit is relegated to the pitiful role of an inferior attribute. However, we support it to the extent that it can serve as an alibi for the anti-scientific spirit. But, above all, we try to dismiss it as a kind of unbearable reproach for a guilty conscience. p. 287”

“At first, both (under other names, of course) can be considered equal parts of the same science, but soon the anti-scientific spirit takes over, just like those weeds that choke plants that we forget to weed. p. 287”

“Current science is not only concerned with seeking the truth. His part of scientific spirit, which in no way resembles science as it is commonly conceived, is far from equaling that of an anti-scientific spirit hostile to the first, but apparently much more scientific than him. p.287”

“The ideology in the present case is eager to give itself the air of science. p. 289”

“The individual is today capable of carrying out an ideological treatment on information received, the effects of which are assured. Science is ultimately content to provide the phraseology, ideas and themes. p. 288”

“It is impossible to refute an ideology. We can only weaken or strengthen it depending on whether we weaken or strengthen its influence on people. p. 286”