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Quotes About Peter the Great

official capital of Russia in 1718 and remains to this day one of the world's most beautiful cities.
~ Abraham Ascher
Yet despite her time-consuming preoccupations with sensual pleasure, Catherine was a dedicated and hard-working sovereign. Not since Peter the Great had Russia been governed by a ruler as energetic, devoted, and successful as she. She wielded decisive power in formulating and executing state policies in both domestic and foreign affairs.
~ Abraham Ascher
But even Peter the Great never dreamed of legislation like Stalin's. To turn ordinary children into enemies of their own parents—everything in him revolted against that. The new Children's Law was very clear, though. Any child who discovered counterrevolutionary tendencies in either parent should report him or her. He had grinned at the
~ Edward Rutherfurd
Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a writer and critic who assumed intellectual leadership of the intelligentsia in the fifties, had in 1848 confided to his diary the thought that Russia needed an autocracy that would champion the interests of the lower classes in order to realize future equality. He added: "Peter the Great acted thus, in my opinion, but such a power must realize that it is temporary, that it is a means, not an end."[10]
~ Robert C. Tucker
What is remarkable is that Herzen, in the earlier years of Alexander II's reign (1855–81), combined this "Russian socialism," as it came to be called, with the theory of progressive autocracy. He called upon Alexander to be a "crowned revolutionary," and a "tsar of the land," and to continue Peter the Great's cause of reform by breaking with the Petersburg period as resolutely as Peter had broken with the Moscow period.
~ Robert C. Tucker
Poseidon's trident was also all over the place, since Peter the Great wanted to stress Russia's sea power. I especially like the trident on top of an obelisk -- what a great Egyptian/Greek mix up!
~ Rick Riordan
1725. The year of The Tour Seasons. The year that Peter the Great became less so, in that he died.
~ Stephen Fry
It would be unseemly for me to beg for your succour so early in this letter, and so I shall divert you (or so I flatter myself) by relating my last conversation with my employer, Peter Romanov, or Peter the Great, as he is now styled—not without perfectly sound reasons—by many (I say "employer" because he owes—I do not say "pays"—me a stipend to act as his advisor on certain matters; my Mistress and liege-lady remains, as always, Sophie). As
~ Neal Stephenson
With the best will in the world, Sam, nobody really cares about journalists getting bumped off in Russia. Your average punter doesn't have a clue who Peter the Great is. Does he play for Liverpool? Was he knocked out in the final of Britain's Got Talent?
~ Charles Cumming
Since Peter the Great, Russia had been expanding at the rate of one Belgium per year.
~ Henry Kissinger
Slavophilism, the messianism of backwardness, has based its philosophy upon the assumption that the Russian people and their church are democratic through and through, whereas official Russia is a German bureaucracy imposed upon them by Peter the Great.
~ Leon Trotsky
This formidable officine dates from Peter the Great, who formed it in 1697...its historic origins must, however, be looked for much earlier; one finds them in the byzantine traditions and in the operations of the Tartar domination...espionage, delation, torture, and secret executions were the normal and regulating instruments of the |||||||| police.
~ Unknown