Mikhail Bulgakov Quotes

Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live.

We are undermining a generation's happiness by depriving them of national identity, religious identity, and gender identity

As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

I became a total yes. We don't even have names anymore.

Oh, for the time when I shall sleep Without identity.

Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?

The Negro wants to be everything but himself... He wants to integrate with the white man, but he cannot integrate with himself or with his own kind. The Negro wants to lose his identity because he does not know his own identity.

There is a terrible blindness in the love that wants only to accommodate. It's not only to do with omissions and half-truths. It implants a lack of being in the speaker and robs the self of an identity without which it is impossible for one to grow close to another.

Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been ... destroyed by sudden environmental change.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.

I can't see my reflection in the waters, I can't speak the sounds that show no pain. I can't hear the echo of my footsteps, or can't remember the sound of my own name.

Sometimes I try to lose my identity, and I can't get rid of it!

I came alone and I go as a stranger. I do not know who I am, nor what I have been doing.

The fact that we're all hyphenating our names suggests that we are afraid of being assimilated. I was talking on the BBC recently, and this woman introduced me as being "in favor of assimilation." I said, "I'm not in favor of assimilation." I am no more in favor of assimilation than I am in favor of the Pacific Ocean. Assimilation is not something to oppose or favor - it just happens.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.

It's not a little thing to lose your identification and who you believe yourself to be.

Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.

She is no longer I, she is too long ago, she is only she.

It makes sense that that's part of the story and everything, but that's part of any story of any record - where was it record and how long and what were the people doing. I think people want to know where these events are made. That's why I like the word "record."

Losing their names, these things underwent a process of uncreation.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.

History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

We can never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

He who trades his identity for money will one day wind up with neither.