Skip to content

We Russians are gregarious folk, warm and talkative and quick to kindle in friendship. We wear our hearts on our sleeves. I am no exception in this respect.

— Victor Kravchenko I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (1946)

Another quote →

Topics

Friendship

More quotes by Victor Kravchenko

I am going to make more hell for the Communists than they dreamed possible.

Every Soviet organization is a hotbed of personal feuds, competing cliques, festering jealousies. This is almost inevitable in an atmosphere where political skill and influence are the decisive values.

I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (1946)

On a battlefield men die quickly, they fight back, they are sustained by fellowship and a sense of duty. Here I saw people dying in solitude by slow degrees, dying hideously, without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause. They had been trapped and left to starve, each in his home, by a political decision made in a far-off capital around conference and banquet tables.

I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (1946)

I believe profoundly that in the struggle against Communists and their organizations, in the defense of freedom and justice, we cannot and should not resort to the methods and forms employed by the Communists.

The most terrifying sights were the little children with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon–like abdomens. Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their faces, turning them into tortured gargoyles; only in their eyes still lingered the reminder of childhood. Everywhere we found men and women lying prone, their faces and bellies bloated, their eyes utterly expressionless.

I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (1946)

All Victor Kravchenko quotes →

You may also like

Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss.

Gautama Buddha

Not for the body, but for the heart; companion and company are needed.

Sanu Sharma

Flowers are lovely; love is flower-like;
Friendship is a sheltering tree;
Oh the joys that came down shower-like,
Of friendship, love, and liberty,
Ere I was old!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

Anaïs Nin Diary entries (1914)

Attribution

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