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It is true that "forced labor" is too mild a term for the camps of the twentieth century and that nobody in the world would actually want to go into a camp or gas chamber.

— Nadezhda Mandelstam

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More quotes by Nadezhda Mandelstam

The great mass of people thus prefer to glide over the surface of reality, always shirking the effort of trying to understand it.

I never ceased to believe in M.'s and Akhmatova's poetry. In our depersonalized world where everything human was silenced, only the poet preserved his "self" and a voice which can still be heard even now.

Now again we are not supposed to remember the past and think-let alone speak about it. (42: Last Letter)

Hope Abandoned (1974)

poetry is an elusive thing that can neither be hidden nor locked away.

man must answer for everything, particularly for his own soul.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Nadezhda Mandelstam (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.