Ilya Ehrenburg Quotes

• 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!

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  Children, Enemy, Wipe

  32 Copy quote

• 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.

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  War, Pride, Army

  57 Copy quote

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

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  Break Through, Environmental, Earth

  80 Copy quote

• 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.

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  Mother, Prayer, Children

  29 Copy quote

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

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  Advantage

  33 Copy quote

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

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  Character, Development, Today

  53 Copy quote

• Every master knows that the material teaches the artist.

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  Artist, Masters, Teach

  14 Copy quote

• There is nothing more wonderful than freedom of speech.

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  Freedom, Freedom Of Speech, Speech

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  Art, Past, Color

  9 Copy quote

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

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  Heart, Men, Approach

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  Art, Degrees, Doe

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  Mistake, Past, People

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  Writing, Fate, Destiny

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  Book, Responsible, Reader

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  Art, Men, Perfect

  4 Copy quote

• There is no progress in art.

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  Art, Progress

  8 Copy quote

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