Quotes from Ilya Ehrenburg

Man is apt to be more moved by the art of his own period, not because it is more perfect, but because it is organically related to him.

Music has a great advantage: without mentioning anything, it can say everything.

Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing.

Time narrows or expands according to how we approach it. It varies with a man's breadth, with his heart.

We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day... Do not count days; do not count miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed.

Kill the Germans, wherever you find them! Every German is our moral enemy. Have no mercy on women, children, or the aged! Kill every German - wipe them out!

Freedome in AMERICA

There is nothing more wonderful than freedom of speech.

Do not count the days, do not count the miles. Count only the Germans you have killed. Kill the German - this is your old mother's prayer. Kill the German - this is what your children beseech you to do. Kill the German - this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill.

A pity we hadn't had time to say all the things we wanted to each other.

I left with a heavy heart and a still heavier suitcase--I had filled it with my favourite books.

In peaceful times in a peaceful country a man grows up, goes to school, marries, works, suffers illnesses, grows old. He may go through the whole of life without understanding what freedom is. No doubt he always feels free to the extent to which it is proper for a respectable citizen with average powers of imagination to be free.

I knew that people lived badly, remembered the barracks of the Khamovniki brewery, had seen flophouses, all-night cafés, drunkards, cruel and ignorant people, prison. But all that had been from the outside, and in the courtroom I caught a glimpse of people's hearts.

Every day I would run to the library to get new books. Reading was a passion: I wanted to understand life. I read Dostoevsky and Brehm, Jules Verne and Turgenev, Dickens and the Zhivopisnoye Obozreniye; and the more I read, th emore I doubted everything. Lies surrounded me on all sides; one moment I wanted to run off to the Indian jungle, the next to throw a bomb at the governor-general's house on Tverskaya, the next to hang myself.

The epithet "monolithic" is often used as a term of praise in this country; but a monolith is a mass of stone. Human beings are far more complex.

They say that sometimes a man cannot recognize himself in a looking-glass. It is even harder to recognize oneself in the clouded mirror of the past.

Modigliani liked Baudelaire's poem about the albatross being mocked by sailors: 'Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!')

Everyone was searching for something, conducting lively arguments, getting excited, but behind it all one felt weariness, disillusion, emptiness.

Today, far continents have become suburbs. Even the moon has somehow come closer. But for all that, the past has not lost its power, and if within a lifetime a man changes his skin an infinite number of times--almost as often as his suits--still he does not change his heart: he has but one.

Like every great love, patriotism broadens one's conscience. A true patriot loves the whole world. Having discovered the greatness of one's native land, it is impossible to conceive hatred for the world. People devoid of love are poor patriots. The pseudo-patriotism of the fascists rests on contempt for other peoples; it narrows down the world to the limits of one language, one type of people, one breed.

I can't listen to music often. It plays on my nerves; it makes me want to say silly, tender things and stroke the heads of people who, living in a dirty hell, can yet create such beauty.

Life seemed too calm; people looked for unhappiness in art as one might look for a raw material in short supply.

You could cover the whole earth with asphalt, but sooner or later green grass would break through.