Top 100 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes
#2. Skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#3. This is Communism's view of war. War is necessary. War is an instrument for achieving a goal.
But unfortunately for Communism, this policy ran up against the American atomic bomb in 1945. Then the Communists changed their tactics and suddenly became advocates of peace at any cost.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#4. We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, and burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#5. The Gulag Archipelago, 'he informed an incredulous world that the blood-maddened Jewish terrorists had murdered sixty-six million victims in Russia from 1918 to 1957! Solzhenitsyn cited Cheka Order No. 10, issued on January 8, 1921: 'To intensify the repression of the bourgeoisie.'
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#7. Patriotism means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation, which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins, and penitence for them.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#8. This is a grave danger: the stoppage of information between the parts of the planet. Contemporary science knows that such stoppage is the way of entropy, of universal destruction.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#13. The same old caveman feeling-greed, envy, violence, and mutual hate, which along the way assumed respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial struggle, mass struggle, labor-union struggle-are tearing our world to pieces.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#14. Here a man can live. All right, it's a 'special' camp. So what? Does it bother you to wear a number? They don't weigh anything, those numbers.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#15. No one, no one at all, ever set out to torture us on purpose! ... After all, was it because Pontius Pilate wanted to humiliate him that Christ was crucified between two thieves? It just happened to be crucifixion day that day - and there was only one Golgotha, and time was short.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#16. A whole week, a single campaign, a month, a week, even a day was far more than enough to cut a company or platoon to ribbons or cripple a man for life: it needed only a quarter of an hour.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#18. In military science there is a principle more important than "Forward": it is that the task should be proportionate to the means.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#19. The most important aspect of detente today is that there is no ideological detente.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#20. The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#22. My wish for you ... is that your skeptic-eclectic brain be flooded with the light of truth.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#24. He could barely stand, the Captain, but he kept on going. Shukhov had an old horse like that at home once. He took good care of that old horse, but he worked himself to death. And then they skinned the hide off him.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#26. When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. Admittedly, this was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by the natural disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#28. The sole substitute for an experience we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#30. By now we are even unsure whether we have the right to talk about the events of our own lives.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#31. His philosophy of life had been that we only live once.
Now there had matured in him the sense of another truth about himself and the world: that we have only one conscience - and that a crippled conscience is as irretrievable as a lost life.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#32. A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#34. Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#37. Lord, give me the strength to accomplish what You've given me to do and the faith to trust You that what I haven't been able to accomplish You've already assigned to someone else.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#39. The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us ... than the need for any external expansion of our power.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#40. I am deeply convinced that God is present both in the lives of every person and also in the lives of entire nations.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#41. But it is human to be outraged by injustice, even to the point of courting destruction!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#42. You cannot love freedom for yourselves alone and quietly agree to a situation where the majority of humanity, spread over the greater part of the globe, is subjected to violence and oppression.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#43. Work was like a stick. It had two ends. When you worked for the knowing you gave them quality; when you worked for a fool you simply gave him eyewash.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#46. Prayers are like those appeals of ours. Either they don't get through or they're returned with 'rejected' scrawled across 'em.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#47. In general, we draw no distinction between intention and the crime itself, and this is an instance of the superiority of Soviet legislation to bourgeois legislation
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#49. The meaning of existence was to preserve untarnished, undisturbed and undistorted the image of eternity which each person is born with - as far as possible.
Like a silver moon in a calm, still pond.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#50. Modern society is hypnotized by socialism. It is prevented by socialism from seeing the mortal danger it is in. And one of the greatest dangers of all is that you have lost all sense of danger, you cannot even see where it's coming from as it moves swiftly towards you.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#51. To reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. Such a rejection is more than a political act. It is a protest of our souls against those who would have us forget the concepts of good and evil.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#52. The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#53. If we don't know our own history, then we simply will have to endure all of the same mistakes, all of the same sacrifices, all of the same absurdities over again - times ten.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#55. Truth must be told-and things must change! If words are not about real things and do not cause things to happen, what is the good of them?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#58. No one, even as a joke, could call a member of the all-Union Communist Party a Neo-Hegelian, a Neo-Kantian, a Subjectivist, an Agnostic, or, God forbid, a Revisionist. But "epicurean" sounded so harmless it could not possibly imply that one was not an orthodox Marxist.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#59. Shall I describe the happiness it gave me to go into the classroom and pick up the chalk? ... It seemed to me the supreme, heartbreaking happiness to enter a classroom carrying a register as that bell rang, and start a lesson with the mysterious air of one about to unfold wonders.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#60. You put your back into the work. For unless you could manage to provide yourself with the means of warming up, you and everyone else would give out on the spot.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#62. Of course, my views developed in the course of time. But I have always believed in what I did and never acted against my conscience.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63. To coexist with communism on the same planet is impossible. Either it will spread, cancer-like, to destroy mankind, or else mankind will have to rid itself of communism (and even then face lengthy treatment for secondary tumors).
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#67. You should rejoice that you're in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#68. One should not ascribe the evil deeds of individual leaders or political regimes to an innate fault of the Russian people and their country.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#70. Art thaws even the frozen, darkened soul, opening it to lofty spiritual experience.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#71. When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#72. You know, there was a time at the beginning of the 50's when this nuclear threat hung over the world, but the attitude of the West was like granite and the West did not yield. Today, this nuclear threat still hangs on both sides, but the West has chosen the wrong path of making concessions.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#73. It makes me happier, more secure, to think that I do not have to plan and manage everything for myself, that I am only a sword made sharp to smite the unclean forces, an enchanted sword to cleave and disperse them.
Grant, O Lord, that I may not break as I strike! Let me not fall from Thy hand!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#76. Nothing worthy can be built on a neglect of higher meanings and on a relativistic view of concepts and culture as a whole. Indeed, something greater than a phenomenon confined to art can be discerned shimmering here beneath the surface - shimmering not with light but with an ominous crimson glow.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#77. But we don't pray for that, I pray that I may do the will of God here. Give us this day ...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#83. I would rather have the United States as the world's policeman than the Soviet Union as the world's jailer.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#85. Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#87. Nowadays we don't think much of a man's love for an animal; we laugh at people who are attached to cats. But if we stop loving animals, aren't we bound to stop loving humans too?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#88. The name of 'reform' simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#93. It was clearly a prisoner's craftwork; that is, the most painstaking work in the world, for prisoners have nowhere to hurry to.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#94. That bowl of soup - it was dearer than freedom, dearer than life itself, past, present, and future.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#95. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high range of human possibilities.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#96. I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#97. Violence does not and cannot flourish by itself; it is inevitably intertwined with lying.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#98. Whether you like it or not, the course of your (America's) history has made you the leaders of the world. Your country can no longer think provincially.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#99. Yes, you live with your feet in the mud and there's no time to be thinking about how you got in or how you're going to get out.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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