No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history'… - Boris Pasternak

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No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries.

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About Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak [Борис Леонидович Пастернак] (10 February 1890 – 30 May 1960) was a Russian poet and writer famous for his 1957 novel Doctor Zhivago. His first book of poems, My Sister, Life (1917), is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, an event which enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which forced him to decline the prize, though his descendants were later to accept it in his name in 1988.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Native Name: Борис Леонидович Пастернак
Alternative Names: Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
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Additional quotes by Boris Pasternak

Это ведь только в плохих книжках живущие разделены на два лагеря и не соприкасаются. А в действительности все так переплетается! Каким непоправимым ничтожеством надо быть, чтобы играть в жизни только одну роль, занимать одно лишь место в обществе, значить всего только одно и то же!

And if he were really to do good he would have needed in addition to his principles, a heart capable of violating them - a heart which knows only of particular not of general cases and which achieves greatness in little actions.

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As he scribbled his odds and ends, he made a note reaffirming his belief that art always serves beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organic life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence.

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