Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes & Sayings

A strong man never loses his head in defeat or despondency. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A tub was brought in to melt snow for mortar. They heard somebody saying it was twelve o'clock already.
"It's sure to be twelve," Shukhov announced. "The sun's over the top already."
"If it is," the captain retorted, "it's one o'clock, not twelve."
"How do you make that out?" Shukhov asked in surprise. "The old folk say the sun is highest at dinnertime."
"Maybe it was in their day!" the captain snapped back. "Since then it's been decreed that the sun is highest at one o'clock."
"Who decreed that?"
"The Soviet government."
The captain took off with the handbarrow, but Shukhov wasn't going to argue anyway. As if the sun would obey their decrees! — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

It is here that we see the dawn of hope: for no matter how formidably Communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what successes it attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Every act of perception has an emotional coloring. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A man used to riding in a car cannot understand a pedestrian. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You must understand, the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Surely people should eventually cease to be surprised at anything? And yet they continue to be. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Everyone is guilty of something or has something to conceal. All one has to do is look hard enough to find what it is. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There also exists another alliance - at first glance a strange one, a surprising one - but if you think about it, in fact, one which is well grounded and easy to understand. This is the alliance between our Communist leaders and your capitalists. This alliance is not new ... We observe continuous and steady support by the businessmen of the West of the Soviet Communist leaders. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Human nature is full of riddles; ... one of those riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength in themselves to rise up and free themselves first in spirit and then in body while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste of freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery?' — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

As the two-thousand-year-old saying goes, you can have eyes and still not see. But a hard life improves vision. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The one who pulls is the one they urge on. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Was it Gorky who said: If your children are no better than you are, you have fathered in vain, indeed you have lived in vain. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

For me faith is the foundation and support of one's life. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

If state, party and social policy will not be based on morality, then mankind has no future to speak of. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The great truth for Innokenty used to be that we are given only one life.
Now, with the new feeling that had ripened in him, he became aware of another law: that we are given only one conscience, too.
A life laid down cannot be reclaimed, nor can a ruined conscience. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We should clearly understand that only the voluntary and conscientious acceptance by a people of its guilt can ensure the healing of a nation. Unremitting reproaches from outside are counterproductive. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Anything too far out of tune with our attitude is lost, either in the ears themselves or somewhere beyond, but it is lost. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There can be no acceptable future without an honest analysis of the past. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

He who knows how to be content will be content with little. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

What a force is laughter. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Work, he said, was a first-rate medicine for any illness. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

European democracy was originally imbued with a sense of Christian responsibility and self-discipline, but these spiritual principles have been gradually losing their force. Spiritual independence is being pressured on all sides by the dictatorship of self-satisfied vulgarity, of the latest fads, and of group interests. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

The central government possesses no plan of finding the way out of this blind alley. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

He's retired, he's just turned sixty, you know. And on the actual day of his retirement it turned out he wasn't a radiologist at heart at all, he didn't want to spend another day of his life on medicine. He'd always wanted to be a beekeeper, and now bees are the only thing he'll take an interest in. How do these things happen, do you think? If you're really a beekeeper, how is it that you waste the best years of your life doing something else? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A storm breaks trees. It only bends grass. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

And this man, who had sailed round Europe and navigated the Great Northern Route, leaned happily over half a ladleful of thin oatmeal kasha, cooked entirely without fat - just oats and water. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Why can't you understand? The stars fall down now and then. The gaps have to be filled. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The days rolled by in the camp - they were over before you could say "knife." But the years, they never rolled by; they never moved by a second. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Art thaws even the frozen, darkened soul, opening it to lofty spiritual experience. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

... skepticism is a way of freeing the dogmatic mind, and that's where its value lies. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Where an open war is impossible, oppression can continue quietly behind the scenes. Terrorism. Guerrilla warfare, violence, prisons, concentration camps. I ask you: Is this peace?

The true antipode of peace is violence. And those who want peace in the world should remove not only war from the world but also violence. If there is no open war but there is still violence, that is not peace. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

We didn't love freedom enough. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

The task of the artist is to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and the outrage of what man has done to it, and poignantly to let people know. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I have absorbed into myself my own eleven years there not as something shameful nor as a nightmare to be cursed: I have come almost to love that monstrous world, and now, by a happy turn of events, I have also been entrusted with many recent reports and letters. So perhaps I shall be able to give some account of the bones and flesh of that salamander - which, incidentally, is still alive — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you - you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

That's all very well, but how many family doctors would you need? It simply doesn't fit into the system of a free universal national health service." "It'll fit into a universal national health service, but it won't fit into a free health service," said Oreshchenkov, rumbling on and clinging confidently to his point. "But it's our greatest achievement, the fact that it's a free service." "Is this in fact such a great achievement? What does 'free' mean? The doctors don't work for nothing, you know. It only means that they're paid out of the national budget and the budget is supported by patients. It isn't free treatment, it's depersonalized treatment. If a patient kept the money that pays for his treatments, he would have turned the ten roubles he has to spend at the doctor's over and over in his hands. He could go to the doctor five times over if he really needed to. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The one who doesn't pull his weight is not asked to pull, while the one who does, pulls for two. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There is a law in the Archipelago that those who have been treated the most harshly and who have withstood the most bravely, who are the most honest, the most courageous, the most unbending, never again come out into the world. They are never again shown to the world because they will tell tales that the human mind can barely accept. Some of your returned POW's told you that they were tortured. This means that those who have remained were tortured ever more, but did not yield an inch. These are your best people. These are your foremost heroes, who, in a solitary combat, have stood the test. And today, unfortunately, they cannot take courage from our applause. They can't hear it from their solitary cells where they may either die or remain for thirty years like Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who was seized in 1945 in the Soviet Union. He has been imprisoned for thirty years and they will not give him up. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

As the old proverb says: Well-fed horses don't rampage. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

The fewer limitations the artist imposes on his work, the less chance he has for artistic success. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it - from The Gulag Archipelago — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Scientists have made no clear effort to become an important, independently active force of mankind. Whole congresses at a time, they back away from the suffering of others; it is more comfortable to stay within the bounds of science. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The essence of life will never be captured by even the greatest of formulas. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

But substantial X-ray treatment is impossible without transfusion!" "Then don't give it! Why do you assume you have the right to decide for someone else? Don't you agree it's a terrifying right, one that rarely leads to good? You should be careful. No one's entitled to it, not even doctors." "But doctors are entitled to that right - doctors above all," exclaimed Dontsova with deep conviction. By now she was really angry. "Without that right there'd be no such thing as medicine! — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When the whole discussion of "developing a national idea" hastily began in post-Soviet Russia, I tried to pour cold water on it with the objection that, after all the devastating losses we had experienced, it would be quite sufficient to have just one task: the preservation of a dying people. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A forest doesn't weep over one tree. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Direct [people] towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Which of us can control his feelings? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The generation now coming out of Western schools is unable to distinguish good from bad. Even those words are unacceptable. This results in impaired thinking ability. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Many of you have already found out, and others will find out in the course of their lives, that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate our attention totally on it's pursuit. But even while it eludes us, the illusion of knowing it still lingers and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We will die, but art will remain. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

One should not consider that the great principles of freedom end at your own frontiers, that as long as you have freedom, let the rest have pragmatism. No! Freedom is indivisible and one has to take a moral attitude towards it. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Only an extraordinary person can turn opportunity into reality. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If a person can build a fence around himself, he is bound to do it. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

On our crowded planet there are no longer any internal affairs! — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage ... Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state into another. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Evidently, evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope. But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme danger or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Work is what horses die of. Everybody should know that. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Communism will never be halted by negotiations or through the machinations of detente. It can only be halted by force from without or by disintegration from within. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Mourn if you must, but don't stop fighting. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Freedom or prison
what's the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

What is the most precious thing in the world? I see now that it is the knowledge that you have no part in injustice. Injustice is stronger than you, it always was and always will be, but let it not be done through you. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Who has the skill to make a narrow, obstinate human being aware of others' far-off grief and joy, to make him understand dimensions and delusions he himself has never lived through? Propaganda, coercion, and scientific proofs are powerless. But happily, in our world there is a way. It is art, and it is literature. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There is no point asserting and reasserting what the heart cannot believe. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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

She was wonderful, in spite of everything she was wonderful. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes ... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones. - Alexander Solzhenitsyn — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The foundation stones of a great building are destined to groan and be pressed upon; it is not for them to crown the edifice. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn