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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

85 quotes

• “Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers — such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers’ Congress (16 May 1967) “The Struggle Intensifies,” Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, ed. Leopold Labedz (1970)

• “I am of course confident that I will fulfil my tasks as a writer in all circumstances — from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer’s pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers’ Congress (16 May 1967); as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz (1970)

• “Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to three students (October 1967) as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz, “The Struggle Intensifies

• “не к счастью устремить людей, потому что это тоже идол рынка ― "счастье"! ― а ко взаимному расположению. Счастлив и зверь, грызущий добычу, а взаимно расположены могут быть только люди! И это ― высшее, что доступно людям!”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Shulubin, in Cancer Ward (1968) Pt. 2, Ch. 10

• “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 (1918–2008) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to the Secretariat of the Soviet Writers’ Union (12 November 1969) as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz, “Expulsion

• “It is almost always impossible to evaluate at the time events which you have already experienced, and to understand their meaning with the guidance of their effects. All the more unpredictable and surprising to us will be the course of future events.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but 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.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Peace and Violence" (1973)

• “A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Gulag Archipelago (1973)

• “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 (1918–2008) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Gulag Archipelago (1973)

• “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 (1918–2008) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Gulag Archipelago (1973)

• “In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted in The Observer (29 December 1974)

• “For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: BBC Radio broadcast, Russian service, as quoted in The Listener (15 February 1979)

• “The clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: How We Must Rebuild Russia" in Komsomolskaya Pravda (18 September 1990)

• “Human nature is full of riddles, and one of these riddles is this: 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 to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit then in body, while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly appear to lose the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and hopelessly confused and lost almost begin to crave slavery?”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Argentina's President Javier Milei Loves Being the Skunk at the Garden Party" (at 47m35s), Honestly with Bari Weiss, 6 June 2024.

• “Here, lads, we live by the law of the taiga. But even here people manage to live. D’you know who are the ones the camps finish off? Those who lick other men’s left-overs, those who set store by the doctors, and those who peach on their mates.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Kuziomin, in the Ralph Parker translation (1963).

• “The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Beat a dog once and you only have to show him the whip.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A man should build a house with his own hands before he calls himself an engineer.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A man with two trades to his credit can easily learn another ten.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “...Вы сильны лишь постольку, поскольку отбираете у людей не всё. Но человек, у которого вы отобрали всё, — уже неподвластен вам, он снова свободен.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “For a country to have a great writer … is like having another government. That’s why no régime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “We, holding Art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters; boldly we direct it, we renew, reform and manifest it; we sell it for money, use it to please those in power; turn to it at one moment for amusement — right down to popular songs and night-clubs, and at another — grabbing the nearest weapon, cork or cudgel — for the passing needs of politics and for narrow-minded social ends. But art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives to us a part of its secret inner light.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Archeologists have not discovered stages of human existence so early that they were without art. Right back in the early morning twilights of mankind we received it from Hands which we were too slow to discern. And we were too slow to ask: FOR WHAT PURPOSE have we been given this gift? What are we to do with it? And they were mistaken, and will always be mistaken, who prophesy that art will disintegrate, that it will outlive its forms and die. It is we who shall die — art will remain. And shall we comprehend, even on the day of our destruction, all its facets and all its possibilities?”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience. Through art we are sometimes visited — dimly, briefly — by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking. Like that little looking-glass from the fairy-tales: look into it and you will see — not yourself — but for one second, the Inaccessible, whither no man can ride, no man fly. And only the soul gives a groan...”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force — they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “From time immemorial man has been made in such a way that his vision of the world, so long as it has not been instilled under hypnosis, his motivations and scale of values, his actions and intentions are determined by his personal and group experience of life.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print", it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Variant translation, as quoted in TIME (25 February 1974)

• “Violence, less and less embarrassed by the limits imposed by centuries of lawfulness, is brazenly and victoriously striding across the whole world, unconcerned that its infertility has been demonstrated and proved many times in history. What is more, it is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification. The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, justice nothing.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let THAT enter the world, let it even reign in the world - but not with my help. But writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art. And no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness — and violence, decrepit, will fall.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Proverbs about truth are well-loved in Russian. They give steady and sometimes striking expression to the not inconsiderable harsh national experience: ONE WORD OF TRUTH SHALL OUTWEIGH THE WHOLE WORLD. And it is here, on an imaginary fantasy, a breach of the principle of the conservation of mass and energy, that I base both my own activity and my appeal to the writers of the whole world.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I was in a state of witless shock, as though flames had suddenly enwrapped and paralyzed me so that for a moment I had no mind, no memory.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less … than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Ivanov came to quite the same conclusion, though life supplied him with quite different material to think about. He puts it like this: many lives have a mystical sense, but not everyone reads it right; more often than not it is given to us in cryptic form, and when we fail to decipher it we despair because our lives seem meaningless… the secret of a great life is often a man’s success in deciphering the mysterious symbols vouchsafed to him, understanding them, and so learning to walk in the true path.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Call no day happy 'til it is done; call no man happy til he is dead.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Harvard's motto is "Veritas." 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 with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive, you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The disappearance of nations would impoverish us no less than if all peoples were made alike, with one character, one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, they are its generalized personalities: the smallest of them has its own particular colors, and embodies a particular facet of God's design.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The centralized atheism before whose armed might the whole world trembles still hates and fears this unarmed faith as much today as it did 60 years ago. Yes! All the savage persecutions loosed upon our people by a murderous state atheism, coupled with the corroding effect of its lies, and an avalanche of stultifying propaganda — all of these together have proven weaker than the thousand-year-old faith of our nation. This faith has not been destroyed; it remains the most sublime, the most cherished gift to which our lives and consciousness can attain.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, [historian] Richard Pipes and many other American politicians... are frozen... with unchanging blindness and stubbornness they keep repeating... this theory about the supposed age-old aggressiveness of Russia, without taking into consideration today's reality.”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In 24 hours she lost eight to 10 purely Russian provinces, 25 million ethnic Russians who have ended up in this very way--as "undesirable aliens." In places where their fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers have lived since way back--even from the 17th century--they face persecution in their jobs and the suppression of their culture, education and language...”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Russia today is terribly sick... But even so, have a conscience and don’t demand that – just to please America – Russia throw away the last vestiges of her concern for her security and her unprecedented collapse. After all, this concern in no way threatens the United States....”

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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