How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
"Gluttons and parasites rode on the backs of starving laborers, drove them to death, and it should have stayed that way? And the other forms of outrage and tyranny? Don't you understand the legitimacy of the people's wrath, their wish to live according to justice, their search for the truth?" (8.5.20)
When he hears Zhivago criticize the Russian Revolution, Anfim Efimovich is willing to admit that it's a shame the Revolution needs to be bloody. But he's utterly convinced that there's no way the country could have allowed the old system to continue. Communism might be harsh, but in his mind, capitalism is way more unjust.
Quote #8
"I go no further than what I've said, I do not preach Tolstoyan simplification and return to the earth, I do not invent my own amendment to socialism on agrarian questions. I merely establish the fact and do not erect our accidentally befallen fate into a system." (9.1.5)
As the novel progresses, Zhivago starts to think that the main problem with philosophical viewpoints is that people try to develop them into social systems that are supposed to solve everything. For him, though, there's a lot in the world that people can't control, and there's no point trying to develop these huge philosophical systems to try and overcome that fact.
Quote #9
"But it turns out that for the inspirers of the revolution the turmoil of changes and rearrangements is their only native element, that they won't settle for less than something on a global scale. The building of worlds, transitional periods—for them this is an end in itself. They haven't studied anything else, they don't know how to do anything." (9.14.15)
Zhivago thinks that Russia's Communist revolutionaries might have their hearts in the right place. But unfortunately, they don't know enough about human history to realize how efforts like theirs have played out in the past. And those who aren't educated about the past are doomed to make the same mistakes over and over.