Top 100 Solzhenitsyn Quotes

#1. Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #3712
#2. But what can you say in a letter?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #7257
#3. The solemn pledge to abstain from telling the truth was called socialist realism.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #10657
#4. In all probability an outburst of desperation in the midst of general submissiveness will always help.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #14246
#5. Skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #16076
#6. 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

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #17185
#7. Violence does not necessarily take people by the throat and strangle them. Usually it demands no more than an ultimate allegiance from its subjects. They are required merely to become accomplices in its lies.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #23929
#8. Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble - and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #31788
#9. If there were no executioners, there would be no executions.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #39671
#10. No one on this earth ever says anything 'once and for all.' If they did, life would come to a stop and succeeding generations would have nothing to say.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #54376
#11. The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one. Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell. The extra three were for leap years.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #65619
#12. Scientific research? Only when not at the cost of ethics-and first of all, those of the researchers themselves.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #82916
#13. A person who is not inwardly prepared for the use of violence against him is always weaker than the person committing the violence. There

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #83190
#14. 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

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #89386
#15. A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #89944
#16. Each person has his special moment of life when he unfolded himself to the fullest, felt to the deepest, and expressed himself to the utmost, to himself and to others.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #93841
#17. When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #102763
#18. 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

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #118127
#19. For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #130724
#20. A drop in the ocean has no fear of a hurricane.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #153671
#21. 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

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #160927
#22. It is the artist who realizes that there is a supreme force above him and works gladly away as a small apprentice under God's heaven.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #161802
#23. Like a bicycle, like a wheel that, once rolling, is stable only so long as it keeps moving but falls when its momentum stops, so the game between a man and woman, once begun, can exist only so long as it progresses. If the forward movement today is no more than it was yesterday, the game is over.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #163179
#24. 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

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #165307
#25. A poet cannot be a Party member ... without paying the price.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #175740
#26. If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person's mind begins to roam irretrievably. One's fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #182300
#27. Shukhov ate his supper without bread
a double portion and bread on top of it would be too rich. So he'd save the bread. You get no thanks from your belly
it always forgets what you've just done for it and comes begging again the next day.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #184331
#28. Oleg had learned a lesson. This was his reward for not hurrying. The lesson was - never rush on without looking around first.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #189010
#29. In our age, when technology is gaining control over life, when material well-being is considered the most important goal, when the influence of religion has been weakened everywhere in the world, a special responsibility lies upon the writer.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #189169
#30. It's quite enough to show a well-beaten dog the whip.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #191525
#31. Violence can only be concealed by a Lie, & the Lie can only be maintained by Violence ... Any man, who has once proclaimed Violence as his Method, is inevitably forced to take the Lie as his Principle

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #195902
#32. People don't know what they are striving for. They waste themselves in senseless thrashing around for the sake of a handful of goods and die without realizing their spiritual wealth.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #202431
#33. But food eaten quickly isn't food.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #215835
#34. A man can safely sacrifice a great deal as long as he clings to the essential.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #219448
#35. We have been fortunate enough to live at a time when virtue, though it does not triumph, is nonetheless not always tormented by attack dogs. Beaten down, sickly, virtue has now been allowed to enter in all its tatters and sit in the corner, as long as it doesn't raise its voice.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #221333
#36. When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #227084
#37. Someone that you have deprived of everything is no longer in your power. He is once again entirely free.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #228569
#38. Art isn't a matter of 'what' but of 'how'.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #229961
#39. Call no day happy 'til it is done; call no man happy til he is dead.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #231588
#40. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #233087
#41. Work, he said, was a first-rate medicine for any illness.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #234712
#42. We didn't love freedom enough.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #240444
#43. It is a major responsibility ... of all communication for each of us to help everyone else discover the best that is in him.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #242362
#44. Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize: Violence has no way to conceal itself except by lies, and lies have no way to maintain themselves except through violence. Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.

Mikhail Gorbachev

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #245905
#45. Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #249866
#46. When we feel that we are not sufficiently respected, we should ask ourselves whether we are living as we should.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #252359
#47. 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

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #261391
#48. On our crowded planet there are no longer any internal affairs!

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #275582
#49. If we could all take a sober look at our history, then we would no longer see this nostalgic attitude to the Soviet past that predominates among the less affected part of our society.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #275755
#50. 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

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #276901
#51. I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances
from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #277282
#52. Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society ... loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #278205
#53. To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #288430
#54. Thus, literature, together with language, preserves and protects a nation's soul.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #291730
#55. The essence of life will never be captured by even the greatest of formulas.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #292662
#56. First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #299422
#57. 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

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #309417
#58. He ate his supper without bread. A double helping and bread
that was going too far. The bread would do for tomorrow. The belly is a demon. It doesn't remember how well you treated it yesterday; it'll cry out for more tomorrow.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #317648
#59. Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #329454
#60. 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

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #334216
#61. We have to condemn the very idea that some people have the right to repress others.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #336561
#62. What's worse than cancer? Leprosy.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #338610
#63. Justness exists, even if few people exist who feel it.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #345911
#64. A meek fellow ... is a real godsend in any gang.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #348987
#65. In military science there is a principle more important than "Forward": it is that the task should be proportionate to the means.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #356731
#66. He who knows how to be content will be content with little.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #360828
#67. The most important aspect of detente today is that there is no ideological detente.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #362923
#68. 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

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #369627
#69. All history is one continuous pestilence. There is no truth and there is no illusion. There is nowhere to appeal and nowhere to go.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #377049
#70. We hear a constant clamor for rights, rights, always rights, but so very little about responsibility. And we have forgotten God. The need now is for selflessness, for a spirit of sacrifice, for a willingness to put aside personal gains for the salvation of the whole Western world.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #379383
#71. The "October Revolution" is a myth generated by the winners, the Bolsheviks, and swallowed whole by progressive circles in the West.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #382700
#72. Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #383217
#73. He'd planned on finding a miracle, and he'd found one. There were many other joys in store for him today in this newly born world...

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #385781
#74. If you wanted to put the world to rights, who should you begin with: yourself or others?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #386099
#75. As he left the room it seemed to him that he was walking between two eternities, on one side a list of the living, with its inevitable crossings-out, on the other - eternal exile. Eternal as the stars, as the galaxies.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #386501
#76. It's only on a black day that you begin to have friends.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #386992
#77. If you always look over your shoulder, how can you still remain human?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #389323
#78. A forest doesn't weep over one tree.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #404844
#79. Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.

David Mitchell

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #409255
#80. Are there really people on this earth who deliberately set out to do evil things? Who say to themselves, I want to hurt people, to inflict all the pain I can, to make their lives impossible?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #413587
#81. My wish for you ... is that your skeptic-eclectic brain be flooded with the light of truth.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #422904
#82. Without even knowing it ourselves, we were ransomed by the small change in copper that was left from the golden coins our great-grandfathers had expended, at a time when morality was not considered relative and when the distinction between good and evil was very simply perceived by the heart.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #426101
#83. The price of cowardice will only be evil. We shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #427509
#84. Solzhenitsyn writes: 'Shalamov's experience in the camps was longer and more bitter than my own, and I respectfully confess that to him and not me was it given to touch those depths of bestiality and despair toward which life in the camps dragged us all.

Anonymous

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #429890
#85. We will die, but art will remain.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #433530
#86. You can build the Empire State Building. Train the Prussian army. Elevate the hierarchy of a totalitarian state higher than the throne of the Most High.
But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #439526
#87. There are questions on which a definite opinion has been established, and they are no longer open to discussion.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #442485
#88. The Communists have for decades loudly proclaimed their goal of destroying the bourgeois world, while the West merely smiled at what seemed to be an extravagant joke.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #443403
#89. Abakumov was cleverer than Yakonov supposed. It was just that prolonged lack of exercise had rendered the minister's brain useless to him.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #452929
#90. I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.

Anthony Marra

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #454671
#91. There is nothing as bitter as this moment when you go out to the morning roll call--in the dark, in the cold, with a hungry belly, to face a whole day of work. You lose your tongue. You lose all desire to speak to anyone.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #455718
#92. But nothing is all black in nature.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #458261
#93. My friends! Let us try to be helpful, if we are worth anything.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #463662
#94. 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

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #468353
#95. Now for the first time you were about to see people who were not your enemies. Now for the first time you were about to see others who were alive, who were traveling your road, and whom you could join to yourself with the joyous word we.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #471165
#96. Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #471613
#97. The most intense patriotism always flourishes in the rear.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #474515
#98. Too much art was no art at all. Like candy instead of bread!

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #491151
#99. As for Europe, its claims towards Russia are fairly transparently based on fears about energy, unjustified fears at that.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #498322
#100. According to Roy Medvedev, Stalin's victims numbered forty million. Solzhenitsyn says the number is far greater - perhaps sixty million. The debate continues even now.

David Remnick

Solzhenitsyn Quotes #505295

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Scroll to Top