“People won't change, nobody can reform them, and it's not worth the effort! Yes, that's right! It's the law of their being. . . . Their law, Sonia! That's right! I know now, Sonia, that whoever is strong and self-confident in mind and spirit has power over them! Whoever is bold and dares has right on his side. Whoever can spit on the most people becomes their legislator, and whoever dares the most has the most right! So it has been in the past, and so it will always be!”
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Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer, essayist and philosopher, perhaps most recognized today for his novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoyevsky's literary output explores human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th-century existentialism, his Notes from Underground (1864), written in the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", was called by Walter Kaufmann the "best overture for existentialism ever written."
His tombstone reads "Verily, Verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." from John 12:24, which is also the epigraph of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.