Nikolai Fyodorov Quotes
Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov was a Russian Orthodox religious philosopher, librarian, and the founder of the movement of thought known as Russian cosmism. He worked for many decades as a quiet and self-effacing librarian at the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow, where he attracted a circle of admirers including Tolstoy, Solovyov, and the young rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. The quotes below are attributed to Nikolai Fyodorov, organized by topic.
Browse Nikolai Fyodorov by topic
Nikolai Fyodorov on Death
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Attributed to Nikolai Fyodorov:
“The common task of humanity is the conquest of death.”
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Attributed to Nikolai Fyodorov:
“Science must serve the resurrection of the dead, not the destruction of the living.”
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“[The] transformation of the blind course of nature into one that is rational [...] is bound to appear to the learned as a disruption of order, although this order of theirs brings only disorder among men, striking them down with famine, plague, and death.”
Quoted by Ed Tandy in " N.F. Fedorov, Russian Come-Upist -
“How unnatural it is to ask, ‘Why does that which exist, exist?' and yet how completely natural it is to ask, ‘Why do the living die?”
Quoted by Ed Tandy in " N.F. Fedorov, Russian Come-Upist -
“The problem of the force which brings the two sexes to unite and give birth to a third being is also a problem of death.”
Part I, § 9, p. 43
Nikolai Fyodorov on Knowledge
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Attributed to Nikolai Fyodorov:
“Knowledge that does not save is mere ornament.”
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“Part I, § 2, pp. 36–37”
The learned, who have fragmented science into a multiplicity of branches, imagine that the calamities that strike and oppress us are within the competence of specialised disciplines to control, whereas in fact they constitute a single problem common to all of us, namely the lack of kinship relations between a blind force and rational beings. This blind force makes no demand on us other than to end -
“Part I, § 4, pp. 38–39”
A truly moral being does not need compulsion and repeated orders to perceive what his duty is – he assigns to himself his task and prescribes what must be done for those from whom he has become separated, because separation (whether voluntary or not) cannot be irreversible. Indeed, it would be criminal to repudiate those from whom one descends and to forget about their welfare. For the learned to -
“[T]he rural problem is (1) loss of kinship between men who, through ignorance, forget their relatedness, and (2) the hostility of nature to humans, which is felt most acutely if not exclusively in villages, where people confront the blind force directly; whereas townsfolk, being remote from nature, may think that man lives at one with nature.”
Part I, § 4, p. 39 -
“Only when all men come to participate in knowledge will pure science, which perceives nature as a whole in which the sentient is sacrificed to the insensate, cease to be indifferent to this distorted attitude of the conscious being to the unconscious force.”
Part I, § 5, p. 40
Nikolai Fyodorov on Love
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Attributed to Nikolai Fyodorov:
“Brotherhood is incomplete until it includes all who have ever lived.”
Nikolai Fyodorov on Nature
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Attributed to Nikolai Fyodorov:
“The earth is too narrow; humanity must inherit the cosmos.”
Nikolai Fyodorov on Politics
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“To admit an absence of causality for the unbrotherly state leads not to peace and brotherhood but merely to playing at peace, to a comedy of reconciliation which creates a pseudo-peace, a false peace which is worse than open hostility because the latter poses a question whereas the former prolongs enmity by concealing it.”
Part I, § 8, p. 42