Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

Every act of perception has an emotional coloring.

Even the most broad-minded of us can embrace only that part of truth into which our own snout has blundered.

Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for-all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him.

With such global events looming over us like mountains, nay, like entire mountain ranges, it may seem incongruous and inappropriate to recall that the primary key to our being or non-being resides in each individual human heart, in the heart’s preference for specific good or evil. Yet this remains true even today, and it is, in fact, the most reliable key we have. The social theories that promised so much have demonstrated their bankruptcy, leaving us at a dead end.

If I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire 20th century... I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.

You get no thanks from your belly-it always forgets what you've just done for it and comes begging again the next day.

Not all of me shall die.

...it's only on a black day that you begin to have friends.

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

If you want to change the world, who do you begin with, yourself or others? I believe if we begin with ourselves and do the things that we need to do and become the best person we can be, we have a much better chance of changing the world for the better.

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

Someone that you have deprived of everything is no longer in your power. He is once again entirely free.

A fish does not campaign against fisheries-it only tries to slip through the mesh.

The one who pulls is the one they urge on.

As the old proverb says: "Well-fed horses don't rampage.

The less you speak, the more you will hear.

Only an extraordinary person can turn opportunity into reality.

One should not ascribe the evil deeds of individual leaders or political regimes to an innate fault of the Russian people and their country.

... but it is human to be outraged by injustice, even to the point of courting destruction!

Nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime.

... people don't know what they are striving for. They waste themselves in senseless thrashing around for the sake of a handful of goods and die without realizing their spiritual wealth.

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

The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

A human being is all hope and impatience.

Human nature, if it changes at all, changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth.

Let your memory be your travel bag.

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

If you live in a graveyard, you can't weep for everyone.

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

I am of course confident that I will fulfill 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.

It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

All classifications in this world lack sharp boundaries, and all transitions are gradual.

It's quite enough to show a well-beaten dog the whip.

We didn't love freedom enough.

For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

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.

What is an optimist? The man who says, "It's worse everywhere else. We're better off than the rest of the world. We've been lucky." He is happy with things as they are and he doesn't torment himself. What is a pessimist? The man who says, "Things are fine everywhere but here. Everyone else is better off than we are. We're the only ones who've had a bad break." He torments himself continually.

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

A great number of publications and movies on the history of the 20th century - albeit of uneven quality - are evidence of a growing demand. Quite recently, the state-owned TV channel 'Russia' aired a series based on Varlam Shalamov's works, showing the terrible, cruel truth about Stalin's camps. It was not watered down.

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?

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.