Doctor Zhivago Power Quotes

When Commisar Gintz shows up at the World War I front, he thinks that he'll be able to convince a bunch of revolting soldiers to return to their posts without a peep. What gives him this idea? Well, he's an educated dude who thinks that people are basically children who can be swayed if you know how to speak to them properly. Unfortunately for Gintz, this isn't the case, and he ends up getting murdered by a mob.

In a world of power hierarchies, everyone loves to pass the buck. In other words, it's really easy to shirk your responsibilities when there's always someone more powerful above you. That way, you can just say, "Hey, my hands are tied. Go talk to the dude in charge."

When revolution sweeps across Russia, people barely know what's going on. All they know is that something way larger than them is happening, and that it'll eventually consume every aspect of their daily lives. That's exactly what happens.

It's funny how the tables can turn in a few short years. In this case, a guy named Kostoed-Amursky has spent much of his past in prison camps because he was sympathetic to the Communist cause. Now that the Communists are in control, though, he's the one opening new prison camps. You'd think he might learn his lesson and decide to end the whole prison camp cycle that's going on. But no, he just enjoys being the one on top now.

In Communist Russia, everyone has a job. But no one ever said you have a job that you want. In the interest of having zero unemployment, the Russian government rounds people up and sends them off to labor camps, which are basically just prison camps. That said, the strange thing is that the Soviets aren't just sending unemployed people; they're sending anyone they want, whether these people already have jobs or not.

When it comes to "pacifying" rebelling villagers, the Red Army doesn't mess around. They kill several people from that village (it doesn't matter whom) and then steal a bunch of the villagers' stuff in order to teach them a lesson about standing up for themselves. The lesson is: don't do it.

At a public meeting, Communist politicians and leaders like to talk about how awful the bourgeois capitalist system treats the people of Russia. The ironic thing is that the Communists do all of these same things. No matter who's in power, it seems like people are going to be exploited.

Of course, everyone would love it if a country could have its revolution with no bloodshed. Unfortunately, this is almost never the way that things go down. Instead, you get a lot of blood and a lot of death, and it's often hard to say whether the new revolutionary government is better than what it replaced.

Zhivago really doesn't want to work as a doctor with the militia known as the Forest Brotherhood. But every time he tries to escape, he feels like he's playing with his life. One of these days, he might get caught by the wrong guy on the wrong day.

At his core, Zhivago doesn't disagree with the concept of treating everyone equally. The problem, he thinks, is that you can never force people to act the way you want them to. You can't force people to treat each other with love, because force and freedom are opposite things, and you can't go around forcing "help" onto people who've never asked for it. A truly successful revolution, it seems, can't come about as a result of coercion.