Quotes from Victor Serge

Perhaps it is a very good thing that we cannot wholly rule our minds and that they force on us ideas and images which we would ignobly prefer to dismiss; thus truth makes its way in spite of egotism and unconsciousness.

What with the political monopoly, the Cheka and the Red Army, all that now existed of the 'Commune-State' of our dreams was a theoretical myth. The war, the internal measures against counterrevolution, and the famine (which had created a bureaucratic rationing apparatus) had killed off Soviet democracy. How could it revive, and when? The Party lived in the certain knowledge that the slightest relaxation of its authority would give day to reaction.

Tamo, u prizemlju, Balkanci: soba puna Grka, protivnika Venizelosa; Makedonaca što samo žele da budu svoji i da ih ne svrstavaju u Grke, Srbe ili Bugare; izbeglice i komite, godinama su izdržavali u planinama uprkos svim okolnostima.

With his worn-out lungs, his obstinate self-effacement, his bookish timidity, Broux is nonetheless a strong man; by means of his awareness of how impossible it is to live, he raises himself precisely to a higher possibility of living, to an endurance which is more sure of itself because it believes it has nothing more to lose. From his weakness he was able to create a strength; from his despair, an acquiescence; from his acquiescence, a hope...

But he did not think....thoughts formed in him and dissolved without control, almost like a reverie. And since he had got through life in that fashion, he did not know that it is possible to think better, more accurately, more clearly.

It is a serious matter to destroy a man's faith without replacing it.

He aquí la muerte, fin de un universo.

The revolution died a self-inflicted death in 1918 with the establishment of the Cheka.

Suicide is often an act of vitality, and even — if it is not the result of neurosis — the act of a person who is powerfully attached to life.

For lack of anything better... it is the failure of others that makes for the strength of the fühers. When there's no worthwhile banner, you start to march behind worthless ones.

Stalin gave Hitler his strength by driving the middle classes away from Communism with the nightmare of forced collectivization, famine, and terror against the technicians.

What are you dreaming of Varvara?" asked Avelii. He saw in her eyes that look, at once absent and intimate, that we have when, perhaps unawares, we reach out so intensely toward another person—toward the deep, multiple self within his parcel of eternity—that we stop noticing him in the present.

after all, there is such a thing as truth.