Author of quotes: Jonathan Littell

...Bullies and ignorant people punish themselves.

Threat - especially in troubled times lies in the ordinary citizens that comprise the state. Really dangerous for mankind, I and you.

The state machine consists of sand grains which she rubs in the dust. It exists only because everyone approves of its existence, even - and quite often until the last minute - its victims.

We readily oppose the state, whether totalitarian or not, the common man, insignificance, or the rascal. Forgetting that the state mainly consists of ordinary people, each of them has its own life, its own history, and the chain of coincidences leads to the fact that some hold the rifle or writing paper, and others in accordance with written paper - are under the barrel of this rifle. Development is very rarely depends on selection and innate tendencies. Not always victims, doomed to death, good, and butchers, who kill and torture, evil. To think so is naive enough to face the bureaucracy, even in an organization like the Red Cross.

If you were born in the country or in an age when no one kills your wife and children, but does not require you to kill other people's wives and children, God bless and go in peace. But you have to understand once and for all: you're probably luckier than me, but you are no better. It is extremely dangerous to imagine themselves to be the best.

Even a person who never fought, never killed on the orders of, feel what I'm saying. Remember small meanness, cowardice, falsity, pettiness anyway there is something to lament. No wonder people invented work, alcohol, empty chatter. It is not surprising that television is a success.

Despite the twists and turns, which in my lifetime were many, I belong to the people who sincerely believe that a person really only needs to breathe, eat, drink, defecate, to seek the truth. The rest is optional.

...We're not here for entertainment. For what, then? I don't know, probably to live longer, to kill time until it kills us.

And, if you think about the insults that people use most readily, often spontaneously off of their lips, expose their own hidden flaws - of course, because a person hates something that most similar.

It is impossible to promise: "I will never kill", we can only say: "I hope not to kill".

... such is the fate of poets - first kill, then honor.

The problem is not in the people, but in your leaders. Communism is a mask stretched over the former face of Russia. Your Stalin is the tsar, the Politburo is the boyars and aristocrats, greedy and selfish, your party cadres are officials, the same as under Peter and Nikolai. The same notorious Russian autocracy, eternal instability, xenophobia, the absolute inability to manage the state intelligently, terror instead of consensus and real power, blatant corruption, which only took other forms, incompetence and drunkenness. Read Kurbsky’s correspondence with Ivan the Terrible, read Karamzin, Kyustin. The main hallmark of your story will never change: humiliation, from generation to generation, from father to son. From time immemorial, and especially since the era of the Mongol yoke, everyone humiliates you, and the policy of your government is not to fight humiliation and its causes, but to hide it from the rest of the world. Peter's Petersburg is nothing more than a Potemkin village, not a window cut into Europe, but a theatrical decoration set up to hide poverty and dirt from the West. But only those who suffer humiliation can be humiliated; and only the humiliated are able to humiliate others. The humiliated nineteen seventeen, from Stalin to the peasant, impose their fear and humiliation on others. Because in this country of the humiliated, the king, no matter how powerful he is, is helpless, his will is drowning in the swamps and swamps of his administration. Everyone bows to the king, and behind his back they steal and weave plots, everyone flatter the authorities and wipe their feet on subordinates, everyone has slavish thinking, your society is saturated with slave spirit from top to bottom, the main slave is a king who cannot do anything with cowardice and by the humiliation of its slave people and from powerlessness it kills, terrorizes and humiliates it even more. And every time a turning point arises in your story, a real chance to break the vicious circle to create a new story, you miss it: and before freedom, your freedom of the seventeenth year, about which you spoke, everyone - both the people and the leaders - recede and return to already developed reflexes. The end of the NEP, the proclamation of socialism in a single country is proof of this. However, hopes have not yet subsided, and cleaning was required. The current revival of sovereignty is the logical conclusion to this process. Russian, forever humiliated, gets rid of his own inferiority, identifying himself with the abstract glory of Russia. A Russian can work fourteen hours a day in a frozen plant, eat brown bread and cabbage all his life and serve a master who is shiny with fat and calls himself a Marxist-Leninist, but rolls them in a limousine with chic chicks while drinking French champagne - the Russian doesn’t care the main thing is that the times of the Third Rome have come. And what the Third Rome will be, Christian or communist, it does not matter. As for the director of the plant, he is shaking for his place, flattering the boss, giving expensive gifts, and if they still kick the directors out, they will plant the same, greedy, ignorant, humiliated and despising workers, because he primarily serves the proletarian state, not people. Once, of course, with violence or not, the communist facade will collapse. And then we will see the former unwashed Russia. Even if you win, you will come out of this war with even greater National Socialists and Imperialists than we, but your socialism, unlike ours, is an empty phrase; nationalism remains, for which you will cling. Germany and other capitalist countries claim that communism has destroyed Russia, but I think that, on the contrary, Russia has destroyed communism. The idea itself is beautiful, and who knows how events would turn out if the revolution were made in Germany and not in Russia? If it were headed by self-confident Germans, your friends Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht? I believe that everything would turn into a catastrophe, because our internal specific conflicts that National Socialism is trying to resolve would aggravate. Although who knows? One thing is not in doubt: the experience of communism undertaken by you is doomed to failure. It can be compared with medical experience conducted in a non-sterile environment - all the results are in vain.

Blame the switchman on the railroad, making the train with the Jews towards the concentration camps?

Good and evil are categories that help measure the feedback of one person to another, but they are absolutely unsuitable and even unworkable to draw conclusions about what is happening in the human soul. Dell killed or ordered to kill, it's Evil; but because it is essentially a good man in relation to his family, indifferent to others and, importantly, respect for the law.