Panait Istrati - Quotes

Quotes

All right, I can see the broken eggs. Where's this omelette of yours? - When he asked about the brutal outcome of social experiments in the Soviet Union, he was told that "in order to make an omelette, you must break some eggs".

I would still tie my faith to the faith of the Jewish people, I would still make its struggle for justice my own, for this is the struggle of all those who are persecuted across this Earth...

Because the kindness of a single human is more powerful than the meanness of a thousand; the evil extinguishes together with the one who provoked it; the good continues to beam after the disappearance of the just. (in Kyra Kyralina)

Trotsky is the gold reserve of the Russian revolution. Without this reserve, I really cannot tell how there will be any revolutionary progress throughout Russia and the world. That would already be the trampling, the sinking... (in an interview)

A flame, just like a thousand others, has now been extinguished, in a vast land rich in hopes. Nothing is to be found in that land, but the chilling wind of egotism, that freezes life.

But it is still the land which gives birth to the most beautiful of flames that warm mankind. Through this, it is sacred and with a long future ahead of it.

Let us help it open its generous inner parts to our souls thirsty for the good and the beautiful.

LET US HEAD FOR THAT OTHER FLAME. (in To the Other Flame)

And while I am watching, out here on the confines of bourgeois Europe, the spectacle of workers who are fleeing workers' Russia, and who are machine-gunned down, followed all the way in front of the Romanian border patrols, finished on the spot and sometimes recaptured by GPU “proletarians” and forcedly brought back to the “worker's motherland”, while I am watching, I say, this system of “organizing” the new world, allow me to love and hate people in a way that is different from yours.

Also, allow me to linger in my “personal resentments” and continue to “narrate” them to the world, fighting alone, under the standard of “the man who will adhere to nothing”. These are, you say, “old trifles (for they are old, old!)” you add in brackets.

Yes, “old, old...” and forever true! Unfortunately. (in L'homme qui n'adhère à rien)