Ilya Ehrenburg Quotations

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

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

There is nothing more wonderful than freedom of speech.

People seldom learn from the mistakes of others-not because they deny the value of the past, but because they are faced with new problems.

There is no progress in art.

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

Unfortunately, young Russian artists are in a difficult position today. Painting, like all other arts, rests on a continuity of experience. More than anything, young painters and sculptors need to know the works of their immediate elders. Such a continuity does not exist here to a sufficient degree in the visual arts.

It’s as much a writer’s concern, who is responsible to his readers for all the books written before him as well as those which will be written after him.

We know that art is connected with the land, with its salt, with its smell, that outside of national culture there is no art. Cosmopolitanism - a world in which things lose their color and form, and words lose their significance. We love in our past all that we consider native, wonderful and fair.

It seems to me that the novel is very much alive as a form. Without any question, every epoch has its own forms, and the novel nowadays cannot resemble that of the nineteenth century. In this domain all experiments are justified, and it is better to write something new clumsily than to repeat the old brilliantly. In the nineteenth century, novels dealt with the fate of a person or of a family; this was linked to life in that period. In our time the destinies of people are interwoven. Whether man recognizes it or not, his fate is much more linked to that of many other people than it used to be.

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.

Every master knows that the material teaches the artist.

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.

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!

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

Kill! Kill! In the German race there is nothing but evil; not one among the living, not one among the yet unborn but is evil! Follow the precepts of Comrade Stalin. Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the racial pride of these German women. Take them as your lawful booty. Kill! As you storm onward, kill, you gallant soldiers of the Red Army.