"Ben" Yair’s Reviews > Memoirs of a Revolutionist > Status Update

"Was there ever before in history, I ask myself, a youthful band engaging in a fight against so formidable a foe, so deserted by fathers and even by elder brothers, although those young men had merely taken to heart, and had tried to realize in life, the intellectual inheritance of these same fathers and brothers? Was there ever a struggle undertaken in more tragical conditions than these?"

-Kropotkin, Pyotr.

'My hopes were realized. But in the meantime, other thoughts and other longings had pervaded my mind. I seriously thought over the reply, and wired, “Most cordial thanks, but cannot accept.”'

-Kropotkin, Pyotr. Memoirs of a Revolutionist.

“What sort of receipt do you want?”

“Well, you write on a paper: ‘I, the undersigned, hereby testify that I was drowned by the will of God, and through no fault of the peasants,’ and you give us that paper.”

“With pleasure—on the other shore.”

-Kropotkin, Pyotr. Memoirs of a Revolutionist.

"The Tsar was very angry with his son, and ordered him to follow the hearse of the officer to the grave. But even this terrible lesson did not cure the young man of his Romànoff haughtiness and impetuosity."

-Kropotkin, Pyotr. Memoirs of a Revolutionist.

"Ganz gave up inscribing any one; but drawing was totally lost for us. No one wanted to learn drawing from that mercenary man."

-Kropotkin, Pyotr. Memoirs of a Revolutionist.

"Yet neither Alexander or I became a military man. The literature of the sixties wiped out the teachings of our childhood."

-Kropotkin, Pyotr. Memoirs of a Revolutionist.

"Men passionately desire to live after death, but they often pass away without noticing the fact that the memory of a really good person always lives. It is impressed upon the next generation, and is transmitted again to the children. Is not that an immortality worth striving for?"

-Kropotkin, Pyotr. Memoirs of a Revolutionist.