Henri Barbusse Quotes (1873-1935)

“I do not regret my youth and its beliefs. Up to now, I have wasted my time to live. Youth is the true force, but it is too rarely lucid. Sometimes it has a triumphant liking for what is now, and the pugnacious broadside of paradox may please it. But there is a degree in innovation which they who have not lived very much cannot attain. And yet who knows if the stern greatness of present events will not have educated and aged the generation which to-day forms humanity's effective frontier? Whatever our hope may be, if we did not place it in youth, where should we place it?”

“...whatever our ignorance left to itself, and whatever the wounds that other human beings are, we ought to study ourselves with a sort of devotion.”

“Yes, there is a Divinity, one from which we must never turn aside for the guidance of our huge inward life and of the share we have as well in the life of all men. It is called the truth.”

“The infirmity of human intelligence is short sight. In too many cases, the wiseacres are dunces of a sort, who lose sight of the simplicity of things, and stifle and obscure it with formulae and trivialities. It is the small things that one learns from books, not the great ones.”

“They who say, "There will always be war," do not know what they are saying. They are preyed upon by the common internal malady of shortsight. They think themselves full of common-sense as they think themselves full of honesty. In reality, they are revealing the clumsy and limited mentality of the assassins themselves.”

“I imagine that some one there is declaiming a great poem, that some one is speaking of Prometheus. He has stolen light from the gods. In his entrails he feels the pain, always beginning again, always fresh, gathering from evening to evening, when the vulture steals to him as it would steal to its nest. And you feel that we are all like Prometheus because of desire, but there is neither vulture nor gods.”

“The dead do not survive except upon earth. Wherever there are revolutionaries, there is Lenin. But one may also say that it is in Stalin more than anyone else that the thoughts and words of Lenin are to be found. He is the Lenin of today.”

“The Western misreading of the Soviet system was largely the product of a simple reflex. The Soviet order — indeed, the practice of communism everywhere — was seen as a form of "progressive" hostility to established Western politics and, particularly, economics. It seemed to represent a new system that had rid itself of the market, of exploitation. Whatever its doubtless temporary — or invented — faults (so the thinking went), the Soviet ideology stood for a better world. Thus many Western writers, including Lion Feuchtwanger, Henri Barbusse, and even Romain Rolland, the sensitive follower of Gandhi, spoke out in defense of the purges.”

“Barbusse is a fine man, but unfortunately a poor performer. He allowed himself to be so completely taken in by the Bolshevists that the congress lost its suprapartisan character.”

“The soldiers who faced one another along the Western Front were drawn from remarkably similar societies. On both sides there were industrial workers and farm labourers. On both sides there were aristocratic senior officers and middle-class junior officers. On both sides there were Catholics, Protestants and Jews. Anyone seeking fundamental differences of national character will look in vain in the records of the trenches. There could be no better illustration of this point than four of the finest novels written about the war by former soldiers - Henri Barbusse's Under Fire, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Frederic Manning's Middle Parts of Fortune and Emilio Lussu's Sardinian Brigade - which depict the experience of service in the ranks in almost interchangeable ways. All the authors, for example, make much more of the differences within their respective armies than the differences between the opposing armies themselves. 'What race are we?' asks Barbusse of his fellow poilus. 'All races. We've come from everywhere.' One man in his company is from Calonne, another from Cette, a third from Brittany, a fourth from Normandy, a fifth from Poitou, and so on.”

“We shall be hearing and reading of this war for decades to come. No one of us can yet guess who will be its Tolstoys, its Barbusses, its Remarques and its Hemingways.”

“The only good war book to come out during the last war was Under Fire by Henri Barbusse. He was the first to show us, the boys who went from school or college to the last war, that you could protest in anything besides poetry, the gigantic useless slaughter and lack of even elemental intelligence in generalship that characterized the Allied conduct of that war from 1915 to 1917.”

“At Paris Novelist Henri Barbusse, winner of the Prix Goncourt with his pen and the Croix de Guerre with his sword, occupies a position unique and anomalous. He is always bringing some unpleasant fact to light, and his genius is always just sufficient to make the expose nauseatingly unforgettable. With such a man what is to be done?”

“I rode together with Einstein on one of the trips back from Caput to Berlin, and he asked me to join him for an appointment with Henri Barbusse, the French novelist of socialist fame and the author of Le Feu (Under Fire), a powerful denunciation of war; until then, Einstein was known as a pacifist. Barbusse was returning to France after having spent time in Moscow. The conversation was in French, a language I had not studied. On the way back, Einstein complained that Barbusse had no understanding of what was transpiring in the Soviet Union; Barbusse soon thereafter published a book on Stalin. I would in a few years' time come to live under Stalin and observed firsthand what had disturbed Einstein.”