Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

You know the words from the Bible: 'Build not on sand, but on rock....' Tyrant leaders respect only firmness...and laugh at persons who give in to them.

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

Let all of us who shared the prison soup meet again in better times!

But what can you say in a letter?

No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death.

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good... Ideology - that is what gives devildoing 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.

Work is what horses die of

This deliberately nurtured hatred then spreads to all that is alive, to life itself, to the world with its colors, sounds, and shapes, to the human body. The embittered art of the twentieth century is perishing as a result of this ugly hate, for art is fruitless without love. In the East art has collapsed because it has been knocked down and trampled upon, but in the West the fall has been voluntary, a decline into a contrived and pretentious quest where the artist, instead of attempting to reveal the divine plan, tries to put himself in the place of God.

In our country they do not permit any information to be X-rayed through and through, nor any discussion to encompass all the facets of a subject. All this is invariably suppressed at the very beginning, so no ray of light should fall on the naked body of truth. And then all this is piled up in one formless heap covering many years, where it languishes for whole decades, until all interest and all means of sorting out the rusty blocks from all this trash are lost.

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?

When you're cold, don't expect sympathy from someone who's warm.

Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the neccessary steadfastness and determination... Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.

The term "national idea" is an unclear one. One might think of it as a widely shared understanding among a people as to the desired way of life in their country, an idea that holds sway over the population. A unifying concept like that can be useful, but should never be created artificially or imposed top-down by the powers-that-be.

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.

Power is a poison well known for thousands of years. If only no one were ever to acquire material power over others! But to the human being who has faith in some force that holds dominion over all of us, and who is therefore conscious of his own limitations, power is not necessarily fatal. For those, however, who are unaware of any higher sphere, it is a deadly poison. For them there is no antidote.

Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.

Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted"—"not permitted"—"this you can and that you can't." Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read. -Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers

In all probability an outburst of desperation in the midst of general submissiveness will always help.

Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.

Why should I trust you? We haven't drunk from the same bowl of soup.

A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day. There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail. Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days. The three extra days were for leap years.

... any country that is not careful can be seized.

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.

You took my freedom away a long time ago and you can't give it back because you haven't got it yourself.

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

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.

When you're young, you haven't the experience, when you're old you haven't the strength.

But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own.

I have always had that inner drive, since my birth. And I have always devoted myself gladly to work - to work and to the struggle.

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

... 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.

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.

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.

Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?

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.

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart...

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.

The strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization. Neither a market economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement of human life. If a nation's spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.

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

The earlier, the more fun. Why put it off? It’s the atomic age!

In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

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.

You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.

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

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

If we look far into the future, one can see a time in the 21st century when both Europe and the USA will be in dire need of Russia as an ally.

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?

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