Solzhenitsyn Quotes & Sayings

A leader should not be a man who arbitrarily imported his own ideas but the essential focal point for a group of people who trusted one another and worked for a common aim. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Any fool can bomb a train, but just try sorting out the mess. — 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

Mutual lack of understanding carries the threat of imminent and violent destruction. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When adversity threatens to paralyze us, we need to reassert control by finding a new direction in which to invest psychic energy, a direction that lies outside the reach of external forces. When every aspiration is frustrated, a person still must seek a meaningful goal around which to organize the self. Then, even though that person is objectively a slave, subjectively he is free. Solzhenitsyn — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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

Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

What a relief, Nadya thought; in that light he would not be able to tell that she had been crying.
"You mean if it weren't for the blackout you wouldn't have come?" Dasha took up Shchagov's tone, flirting unconsciously, as she did with every unmarried man she met.
"By no means, never. In bright light women's faces are deprived of all their charm; it reveals their spiteful expressions, their envious glances, their premature wrinkles, their heavy cosmetics."
Nadya shuddered at the words "envious glances" - it was as if he had overheard their argument.
Shchagov went on:" If I were a woman, I would make it a law that lights be kept low. Then everyone would soon have a husband."
Dasha looked disapprovingly at Shchagov. He always talked that way, and she didn't like it. All his phrases seemed memorized, insincere. — 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

Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide process, with East and West yielding the same results, and once again for the same reason: Men have forgotten God. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Only the first swath cut by the scythe is difficult. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

To his and everybody else's way of thinking, you should build a house with your own hands before you start talking about being an engineer. — 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

If you always look over your shoulder, how can you still remain human? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Morality is always higher than law and we cannot forget this ever. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Only a small crack ... but cracks make caves collapse. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Education doesn't make you smarter. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

But why should I go there?"
She looked sideways at him. All the time they had been talking Kostoglotov's face had grown kinder and softer.
"Why should you?" He furrowed the skin of his forehead, as though searching for words with which to propose a toast. "Zoyenka, how can you tell which part of the world you'd be happy in, and which you'd be unhappy in? Who can say he knows that about himself? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Happiness doesn't depend on the actual number of blessings we manage to scratch from life, only our attitude towards them ... — 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

Human rights' are a fine thing, but how can we make ourselves sure that our rights do not expand at the expense of the rights of others. A society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing to adversity. If we do not wish to be ruled by a coercive authority, then each of us must rein himself in ... A stable society is achieved not by balancing opposing forces but by conscious self-limitation: by the principle that we are always duty-bound to defer to the sense of moral justice. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

When we feel that we are not sufficiently respected, we should ask ourselves whether we are living as we should. — 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

By dying young, a man stays young forever in people's memory. If he burns brightly before he dies, his light shines for all time. In his musings during the past few weeks Vadim had discovered an important and at first glance paradoxical point: a man of talent can understand and accept death more easily than a man with none - yet the former has more to lose. A man of no talent craves long life, yet Epicurus had once observed that a fool, if offered eternity, would not know what to do with it. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The price of cowardice will only be evil. We shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I dare hope that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

One thing about women Yefrem had found out in his life: they cling. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We are so attached to the earth, and yet we are incapable of holding onto 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

If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When things are too clear, they are no longer interesting. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I am not a critic of the West; I am a critic of the weakness of the West. I am a critic of a fact we can't comprehend: how one can lose one's spiritual strength, one's will power and possessing freedom, not value it, not be willing to make sacrifices for it. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

That maxim of Descartes: "Question everything!" Question everything! — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Let your memory be your travel bag. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It was wrong to be too pragmatic, to judge people solely by results; it was more humane to judge by intentions. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You should rejoice that you're in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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

Strange how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

During my time in the camps, I had got to know the enemies of the human race quite well: they respect the big fist and nothing else; the harder you slug them, the safer you will be. — 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

Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes a person's noblest impulses. — 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

Even the most rational approach to ethics is defenseless if there isn't the will to do what is right. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A drop in the ocean has no fear of a hurricane. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle. — 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

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

Human beings are better and lazier than their rules and instructions ... — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In his 1978 Harvard commencement address, Solzhenitsyn listed a litany of woes facing the West: the loss of courage and will, the addiction to comfort, the abuse of freedom, the capitulation of intellectuals to fashionable ideas, the attitude of appeasement with evil. — Charles W. Colson

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest.
Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?
The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest"
If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

No one in our time finds it surprising if a man gives careful daily attention to his body, but people would be outraged if he gave the same attention to his soul. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

How easy it is for me to live with you, Lord!
How easy it is for me to believe in You!

When my mind is distraught
and my reason fails,
when the cleverest people do not see further
than this evening and do not know
what must be done tomorrow -
You grant me the clear confidence,
that You exist, and that You will take care
that not all the ways of goodness are stopped.

At the height of earthly fame I gaze
with wonder at that path
through hopelessness -
to this point, from which even I have been able to convey
to men some reflection of the light which comes from You.

And you will enable me to go on doing
as much as needs to be done.
And in so far as I do not manage it -
that means that You have allotted the task to others. — 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

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Archaeologists have not yet discovered any stage of human existence without art. Even in the half-light before the dawn of humanity we received this gift from Hands we did not manage to discern. Nor have we managed to ask: Why was this gift given to us and what are we to do with it? And all those prophets who are predicting that art is disintegrating, that it has used up all its forms, that it is dying, are mistaken. We are the ones who shall die. And art will remain. The question is whether before we perish we shall understand all its aspects and all its ends. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Not death itself, but only the moral preparation for it, holds terrors. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A work of art contains its verification in itself: artificial, strained concepts do not withstand the test of being turned into images; they fall to pieces, turn out to be sickly and pale, convince no one. Works which draw on truth and present it to us in live and concentrated form grip us, compellingly involve us, and no one ever, not even ages hence, will come forth to refute them. — 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

Some are bound to die young. By dying young a person stays young in people's memory. If he burns brightly before he dies, his brightness shines for all time. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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

In the twenties the religious education of
children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code - in other words, counterrevolutionary propaganda! True, one was still permitted to renounce one's religion at one's trial: it didn't often happen but it nonetheless did happen that the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children while the mother went to the Solovetsky Islands. (Throughout all those years women manifested great firmness in their faith.) All persons convicted of religious activity received tenners, the longest term then given. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You know, that is one of the consequences of the weak sense of responsibility of the press. The press does not feel responsibility for its judgments. It makes judgments and attaches labels with the greatest of ease. Mediocre journalists simply make headlines of their conclusions, which suddenly become generally accepted. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

The secret is that when you've been pitched head first into hell you just write about it — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It's true that private enterprise is extremely flexible, But its only good within very narrow limits. If private enterprise isn't held in an iron grip it gives birth to people who are no better than beasts, those stock-exchange people with greedy appetites beyond restraint. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

That which is called humanism, but what would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of our life — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

As the fathers live, so the children play. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Sometimes I feel quite distinctly that what is inside me is not all of me. There is something else, sublime, quite indestructible, some tiny fragment of the Universal spirit.Don't you feel that? — 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

So far as we know, the gray-mustached working class approved these executions. So far as we know, from the blazing Komsomols right up to the Party leaders and the legendary army commanders, the entire vanguard waxed unanimous in approving these executions. Famous revolutionaries, theoreticians, and prophets, seven years before their own inglorious destruction, welcomed the roar of the crowd, not guessing then that their own time stood on the threshold, that soon their own names would be dragged down in that roar of "Scum!" "Filth! — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There are questions on which a definite opinion has been established, and they are no longer open to discussion. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I have grown used to the fact that public repentance is the most unacceptable option for the modern politician. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that "past" which "ought not to be stirred up. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When people at dinner parties ask me how I can possibly operate in the current political environment, with all the negative campaigning and personal attacks, I may mention Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or some guy in a Chinese or Egyptian prison somewhere. In truth, being called names is not such a bad deal. — Barack Obama

If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: 'It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.'

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us ... than the need for any external expansion of our power. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Finally, he gave up trying to quiet her and lit a cigarette, the last resort of a man who finds himself in an intolerably stupid position. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Of course in the present situation the Communists have to use various disguises. Sometimes we hear words like "popular front," at other times "dialogue with Christianity." For Communists a dialogue with Christianity! In the Soviet Union this dialogue was a simple matter: they used machine guns and revolvers. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

And we, from the whole of our life experience there, have concluded that there is only one way to withstand violence: with firmness. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn