Vasily Grossman Quotes

21 quotes in 476 categories

• Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a…
• Man and fascism cannot co-exist. If fascism conquers, man will cease to exist and there will remain only man-like creatures that have undergone an internal…
• There is a deep and undeniable sadness in all this: whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good that will never be overcome by…
• Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die - anything to stop remembering.
• There was something terrible, but also something sad and melancholy in this long cry uttered by the Russian infantry as they staged an attack. As…
• Thousands of people are being buried and no one attends the funerals,' said one of the soldiers. 'In peacetime it's the other way round: one…
• There are people whose souls have just withered, people who are willing to go along with anything evil - anything so as not to be…
• The divine impeccability of the immortal [Soviet] State turned out not only to have suppressed individual human beings but also to have defended them, to…
• Humanity will live as long as there are humans.
• Chekhov said: let's put God - and all these grand progressive ideas - to one side. Let's begin with man; let's be kind and attentive…
• And in this silence of the dumb and these speeches of the blind, in this medly of people bound together by the same grief, terror…
• I have written only what I have thought through, felt through and suffered through.
• In the cruel and terrible time in which our generation has been condemned to live on this earth, we must never make peace with evil.…
• The history of humanity is the history of human freedom...Freedom is not, as Engels thought, "the recognition of necessity." Freedom is the opposite of necessity.…
• Ivan tells Anna: "I used to imagine that being embraced by a woman . . . as something so wonderful that it would make me…
• Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her…
• Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of…
• I don't believe in your "Good". I believe in human kindness.
• He was endowed with the extraordinary powers of endurance characteristic of madmen and simpletons.
• I don't want you to be young and beautiful. I only want one thing. I want you to be kind-hearted - and not just towards…

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