Rúnar > Rúnar's Quotes

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  • #1
    Vasily Grossman
    “Everything that lives is unique. It is unimaginable that two people, or two briar-roses, should be identical . . . If you attempt to erase the peculiarities and individuality of life by violence, then life itself must suffocate.”
    Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

  • #2
    Vasily Grossman
    “There is a terrible similarity between the principles of Fascism and those of contemporary physics. Fascism has rejected the concept of a separate individuality, the concept of ‘a man’, and operates only with vast aggregates. Contemporary physics speaks of the greater or lesser probability of occurrences within this or that aggregate of individual particles. And are not the terrible mechanics of Fascism founded on the principle of quantum politics, of political probability?”
    Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

  • #3
    Vasily Grossman
    “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 own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities.”
    Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

  • #4
    Vasily Grossman
    “These camps – with their streets and squares, their hospitals and flea markets, their crematoria and their stadiums – were the expanding cities of a new Europe.”
    Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

  • #5
    Vasily Grossman
    “After dancing all night at a New Year’s ball, a girl will be unable to say whether the time passed quickly or slowly. Similarly, a man who has done twenty-five years in the Schlüusselburg Prison will say: ‘I seem to have been a whole eternity in this fortress, and at the same time I only seem to have been here a few weeks.’ The night at the ball is full of looks, smiles, caresses, snatches of music, each of which takes place so swiftly as to leave no sense of duration in the girl’s consciousness. Taken together, however, these moments engender the sense of a long interval of time that contains all the joys of human existence. For the prisoner it is the exact opposite: his twenty-five years are composed of discrete intervals of time – from morning roll-call to evening roll-call, from breakfast to lunchtime – each of which seems unbearably long. But the twilight monotony of the months and years engenders a sense that time itself has contracted, has shrunk. And all this gives rise to the same sense of simultaneous quickness and endlessness felt by the girl at the ball.”
    Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

  • #6
    Vasily Grossman
    “Byerozkin knew very well that the man with no quiet at the bottom of his soul was unable to endure for long, however courageous he might be in combat. He thought of fear or cowardice, on the other hand, as something temporary, something that could be cured as easily as a cold.”
    Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

  • #7
    Vasily Grossman
    “Fascism will perish for the very reason that it has applied to man the laws applicable to atoms and cobblestones!”
    Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

  • #8
    Vasily Grossman
    “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 transformation. But if man, man who is endowed with reason and kindness, should conquer, then Fascism must perish, and those who have submitted to it will once again become people.”
    Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

  • #9
    Vasily Grossman
    “The labour of those who enjoy the confidence of the Party is imperceptible. But it is a vast labour – one must expend one’s mind and soul generously, keeping nothing back.”
    Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

  • #10
    Vasily Grossman
    “the world of the human soul suddenly seemed so vast as to make even the raging war seen insignificant.”
    Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

  • #11
    Vasily Grossman
    “No one has the right to lead other people like sheep. That’s something even Lenin failed to understand. The purpose of a revolution is to free people. But Lenin just said: “In the past you were led badly, I’m going to lead you well.”
    Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

  • #12
    Vasily Grossman
    “What’s really terrifying is when you realize that bureaucracy isn’t simply a growth on the body of the State. If it were only that, it could be cut off. No, bureaucracy is the very essence of the State.”
    Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

  • #13
    Vasily Grossman
    “Each wave breaking against the cliff would believe it was dying for the good of the sea; it would never occur to it that, like thousands of waves before and after, it had only been brought into being by the wind.”
    Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

  • #14
    Vasily Grossman
    “life can be defined as freedom. Life is freedom. Freedom is the fundamental principle of life. That is the boundary – between freedom and slavery, between inanimate matter and life.”
    Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

  • #15
    Vasily Grossman
    “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 one good deed – while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.”
    Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

  • #16
    Vasily Grossman
    “even though they all knew only too well that at times like these no man can forge his own happiness and that fate alone has the power to pardon and chastise, to raise up to glory and to plunge into need, to reduce a man to labour-camp dust, nevertheless neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store – hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labour camp – they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man’s eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be”
    Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

  • #17
    Ayn Rand
    “People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”
    Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged



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