Ilya Ehrenburg Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

There is no progress in art.

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.

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.

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.

There is nothing more wonderful than freedom of speech.

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