Andrei Platonov Quotes

While we yearn for peace, we live in a world burdened with hunger, pain, anguish, loneliness, sickness, and sorrow.

Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime.

I don't think we can be entirely happy seeing such misery around us.

Where is there beauty when you see deprivation and starvation?

If beggars do not hate the rest of us, they are even more abject than I had imagined.

In Hanover Park they highlighted the terrible plight of backyard dwellers and the fact that year after year nothing has been done to help you: the hope and despair you all live with every day.

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

To see those babies with no food for three of four days, old people sitting in the hot sun, when you see these poor people, you cannot help but being compassionate or affected.

It is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.

From these cities they would go on again, by the roads of vines and olives, through squalid villages, where there was not a hovel without a gap in its filthy walls, not a window with a whole inch of glass or paper; where there seemed to be nothing to support life, nothing to eat, nothing to make, nothing to grow, nothing to hope, nothing to do but die.

… the unhappy Peasant cannot survive in his humble shelter; today pigswill is his only nourishment; what was once lavished on swine is now shared between man and beast. The People ask only for bread; they are even willing to pay for it with the sweat of their brows: at least let them eat it without watering it with tears.

The amount of suffering I've seen is beyond belief. The amount of inequality is beyond belief.

To him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth.

Everything that poverty touches becomes frightful.

Loneliness and hunger were my fortunes of creation.

Want is misery.

I don't know how to live good. I only know how to suffer.

My background is degradation and sloth, mostly.

The real world is horrible.

As London is the greatest of all cities, there is naturally the greatest amount of human wretchedness to be seen concentrated within it; wretchedness too, that is made to look still more wretched, simply from the fact of its being associated with the most abundant comfort in the world.

Brother! We have, as your friends, fought by your side, and have poured out our blood in your defense, but our arms are now broken. You have grown large. My people have become small, and there are none who take pity on them.

A scene of misery and gloomy despair of a community of people who have been plunged abruptly from prosperity to a complete want of the most essential things of life.

I had a very hard life in Kazakhstan.

Three were the fates. Poverty that chains; gray drudgery that grinds the hope away, and gaping ignorance that starves the soul.