Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

To coexist with communism on the same planet is impossible. Either it will spread, cancer-like, to destroy mankind, or else mankind will have to rid itself of communism (and even then face lengthy treatment for secondary tumors).

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.

Cracks make caves collapse.

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.

To preserve his life, should a man pay everything that gives it color, scent and excitement?

The solemn pledge to abstain from telling the truth was called socialist realism.

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

A horrible human toll the Russian Orthodox Church suffered throughout almost the entire 20th century. The Church is just rising from its knees. Our young post-Soviet state is just learning to respect the Church as an independent institution.

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.

The perception of the West as mostly a "knight of democracy" has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals.

Too much art was no art at all. Like candy instead of bread!

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

An engineer cannot participate in irrationality.

Human beings are better and lazier than their rules and instructions.

Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same with happiness, the very same...happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. There's a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: 'Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied.

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.

Truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.

And the over-all fact that you are a frail vessel full of errors.

Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.

Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!

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

Justness exists, even if few people exist who feel it.

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.

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.

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

What a force is laughter.

... but food eaten quickly isn't food.

The most intense patriotism always flourishes in the rear.

Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art-and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, oversimplified explanations.

Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day.

People can live through hardship, but from hard feelings they perish.

My wish for you... is that your skeptic-eclectic brain be flooded with the light of truth.

After all, man is a complicated being, why should he be explainable by logic?

I will tell you something else: it is a major responsibility not only of portraiture but of all human communication for each of us to help everyone else discover the best that is in him.

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.

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.

If someone asked you, why not help him out?

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

...skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.

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.

I hope that no one present will suspect me of offering my personal criticism of the Western system to present socialism as an alternative. Having experienced applied socialism in a country where the alternative has been realized, I certainly will not speak for it. The well-known Soviet mathematician Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliant book under the title Socialism; it is a profound analysis showing that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.

There are defendants whom the judges are afraid of.

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?

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

It takes a fool to rush off to war!

Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.

... a man can safely sacrifice a great deal as long as he clings to the essential.

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