Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes:

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Topics: Country, Travel, Memories, Eat Your Heart, Inspirational Vacation

When I was young, the early death of my father cast a shadow over me - and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final, milestone of one's existence.

Topics: Attitude, Father, Mean, Early Death

The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. "One word of truth outweighs the world.

Topics: Truth, Honesty, Lying, Truth Be Told, Honest Truth

When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps.

Topics: Wall, Writing, Paper, Stone Walls, Gulags

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

source: - Nobel lecture as quoted in "Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record" edited by Leopold Labedz, 1974.

Topics: Peace, War, Lying, Antiwar, Violence And Peace

Of course, my views developed in the course of time. But I have always believed in what I did and never acted against my conscience.

Topics: Views, Always Believe, Conscience

A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.

Topics: Happiness, Being Happy, Attitude, Choose To Be Happy, Kinship

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

Topics: Facts, Politician, Modern

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.

Topics: Christian, Russia, Media, Uncaring, Ussr

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

Topics: Support, Foundation

It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.

source: - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1974). “August 1914”, Harmondsworth : Penguin

Topics: Humility, Law, Profound, Universal Laws, Educated Person

Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad.

Topics: Fundamentals, Literature, Significant

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?

source: - "The Gulag Archipelago". Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1973.

Topics: Peace, Heart, Humility, Dividing, Necessary Evil

I think the gap between rich and poor is an extremely dangerous phenomenon and needs the immediate attention of the state.

source: - Interview with Ryan Dombal, pitchfork.com. November 14, 2014.

Topics: Thinking, Needs, Attention, Rich And Poor

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.

Topics: Spiritual, Government, Perfect, Spiritual Energy, Industrialization

Voting for impersonal parties and their programmes is a false substitute for the only true way to elect people's representatives: voting by an actual person for an actual candidate.

Topics: Party, People, Voting

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

Topics: Peace, War, Historical

The "October Revolution" is a myth generated by the winners, the Bolsheviks, and swallowed whole by progressive circles in the West.

Topics: Circles, West, October, October Revolution, Bolsheviks

... direct [people] towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.

Topics: Love, People, Achievement

Only an extraordinary person can turn opportunity into reality.

Topics: Opportunity, Reality, Turns, Extraordinary Person

A great disaster had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.

Topics: Men, Russia, Forgotten

We should clearly understand that only the voluntary and conscientious acceptance by a people of its guilt can ensure the healing of a nation. Unremitting reproaches from outside are counterproductive.

Topics: Healing, Acceptance, People, Counterproductive

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

Topics: Peace, War, Lying

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.

Topics: Time, Blow, Dust, Repression

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

Topics: Spiritual, Lying, Thinking, Prospering

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

Topics: Power

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.

Topics: Attitude, Past, Looks

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

Topics: Sacrifice, Men, Dozen

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.

Topics: Pages, Bitter, Blame

Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.

Topics: Doe, Talent, Abundance, Abundance And Prosperity

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.

Topics: Struggle, Birth, Devoted

Yes, you live with your feet in the mud and there's no time to be thinking about how you got in or how you're going to get out.

Topics: Thinking, Feet, Mud

It is not our level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes lie within our power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.

Topics: Love, Happiness, Attitude, Choose To Be Happy, Kinship

Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.

Topics: Men, Goal, Soul

It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!

Topics: Lying, Artist, Defeat

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words…By means of art were are sometimes sent - dimly, briefly - revelations unattainable by reason.

Topics: Art, Mean, Names

Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and can be 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.

Topics: Inspirational, Sweet, Night, Gulags

At what point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about one of them individually...and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest.

Topics: Taken, Home, Together

To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail.

Topics: Jail, Truth Is

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?

Topics: Inspirational, Heart, Cutting

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

Topics: Light, Brain, Wish, My Wish For You, Eclectic

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.

Topics: Attitude, Blessing, Contentment, Satiety

The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.

Topics: Lying, Responsibility, Humanity

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

Topics: Gambling, Forever, Action, Be Cautious

Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.

Topics: Peace, War, Lying

Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.

Topics: Funny, Truth, Add

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Topics: Art, Artist, Names

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

Topics: Health, Psychics, Disease, Superficiality, 20th Century

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

Topics: Memories, Heart, Cutting, Intrusion, Spiritual Unity

Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig.

Topics: Heart, Pride, Pigs, Lard

The name of 'reform' simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.

Topics: Names, Reform, Heritage

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.

Topics: Knowing, Elude, Attention, Elude Us

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday. Look around you - there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn't make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you'll hear.

Topics: Country, Memories, Heart

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.

Topics: Artist, Heaven, Realizing, Apprentice

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

Topics: Ignorance, Responsibility, Rights, East And West

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Topics: Memories, Generations, Literature, Transmit

Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.

Topics: Men, Careers, Interesting

The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.

Topics: Art, Literature, Substitutes

We always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.

Topics: Pay, Chasing, Gulags

I would rather have the United States as the world's policeman than the Soviet Union as the world's jailer.

Topics: War, Unions, United States, Jailer, Cold War

The Communists have for decades loudly proclaimed their goal of destroying the bourgeois world, while the West merely smiled at what seemed to be an extravagant joke.

Topics: War, Goal, World

Violence does not and cannot flourish by itself; it is inevitably intertwined with lying.

Topics: Lying, Doe, Violence, Intertwined

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

Topics: Prison, Prisoner

Lord, give me the strength to accomplish what You've given me to do and the faith to trust You that what I haven't been able to accomplish You've already assigned to someone else.

Topics: Giving, Able, Give Me Strength

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.

Topics: Heart, Keys, Evil, Social Theory, Mountain Ranges

If you wanted to put the world to rights, who should you begin with: yourself or others?

Topics: Rights, World, Should

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.

Topics: War, Self, Cold, Bolsheviks

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.

Topics: War, Cold, Communism, Detente, Disintegration

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).

Topics: War, Cancer, Faces, Coexist, Tumors

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

Topics: People, Should

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

Topics: Party, Heart, Years, Human Heart, Imprisonment

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

Topics: Beautiful, Stars, Moon

The revolution is an amalgam of former Party functionaries, quasi- democrats, KGB officers, and black-market wheeler-dealers, who are standing in power now and have represented a dirty hybrid unseen in world history

Topics: Party, Dirty, Kgb, Dealer

Mistakes are a great educator when one is honest enough to admit them and willing to learn from them

Topics: Mistake, Honest, Enough, Willing To Learn, Feeling Stuck

Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit.

Topics: Spirit, Socialism, Destruction

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.

Topics: Men, Evil, East

If... if... We didn't love freedom enough. And even more - we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! ........... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

Topics: Real, Gun, Awareness, Love Freedom, Outburst

If we live in a state of constant fear, can we remain human?

Topics: States, Constant, Humans

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

Topics: Prison, Bless

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.

Topics: Dark, Clouds, Years, Dark Clouds

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

Topics: Happy, Attitude, Blessing

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.

Topics: Cutting, Opportunity, Men, Rations

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers . . . we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

source: - "The Gulag Archipelago". Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, www.believermag.com. 1973.

Topics: Integrity, Evil, Justice, Keeping Silent, New Generation

The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe

Topics: Mistake, Good Things, Cringe

The most intense patriotism always flourishes in the rear.

Topics: Intense

It is a brave man who is the first to sit down during a standing ovation.

Topics: Men, Brave, Ovation

Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask; by whom has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?

Topics: Powerful, World, Progressive

Why can't you understand? The stars fall down now and then. The gaps have to be filled.

Topics: Stars, Fall, Gaps

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

Topics: Action, Justification, Humans

To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.

Topics: Education, Roots, People

There also exists another alliance - at first glance a strange one, a surprising one - but if you think about it, in fact, one which is well grounded and easy to understand. This is the alliance between our Communist leaders and your capitalists. This alliance is not new. ... We observe continuous and steady support by the businessmen of the West of the Soviet Communist leaders.

Topics: Thinking, Support, Leader, Communist Leaders

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.

Topics: Art, Hate, Fall, Perishing

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

Topics: Forgive Me, Forgiving, May, Please Forgive Me, Gulags

Everyone is guilty of something or has something to conceal. All one has to do is look hard enough to find what it is.

Topics: Looks, Guilty, Enough

If one is a professional soldier, it is part of one's job to die sooner or later.

Topics: Jobs, Soldier, Sooner Or Later

We have ourselves to save.

Topics: Survival

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

Topics: Survival, Trying, Doe, Fisheries, Mesh

Surrender one hair, and you'll end up beardless.

Topics: Hair, Surrender, Ends

... the inexorable lesson of centuries: suffering must be borne; there is no way out.

Topics: Suffering, Lessons, Way, Inexorable

If it goes well with you, then all is well.

Topics: Wells

I am a frail vessel full of errors.

Topics: Errors, Self, Frail

... 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.

Topics: Spiritual, People, Sake, Spiritual Wealth

To taste the sea all one needs is one gulp.

Topics: Sea, Needs, Taste

There is a law of time, a law of oblivion: glory to the dead; life to the living.

Topics: Time, Law, Oblivion

Shall I describe the happiness it gave me to go into the classroom and pick up the chalk? ... It seemed to me the supreme, heartbreaking happiness to enter a classroom carrying a register as that bell rang, and start a lesson with the mysterious air of one about to unfold wonders.

Topics: Teaching, Air, Heartbreaking, Chalk

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

Topics: Past, Analysis, Honest

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

Topics: Men, Car, Understanding, Pedestrians, Riding In A Car

Truth must be told-and things must change! If words are not about real things and do not cause things to happen, what is the good of them?

Topics: Truth, Real, Causes

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

Topics: Truth, Bars, Causes

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

Topics: Truth, Embrace, Broads

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

Topics: Trust, Drunk, Soup

Cracks make caves collapse.

Topics: Cracks, Caves, Trifles

A forest doesn't weep over one tree.

Topics: Tree, Forests

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.

Topics: Children, Parenting, Vain

There is eternal simplicity to a solution once it has been discovered!

Topics: Simplicity, Solutions

A poet cannot be a Party member ... without paying the price.

Topics: Party, Poetry, Poet

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.

Topics: Art, Grief, Our World

We will die, but art will remain.

Topics: Art

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

Topics: Art, Too Much, Bread

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.

Topics: Art, Men, People

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.

Topics: Art, Mean, Simple, Lost And Confused, Finding Strength

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

Topics: Aging, Young, Old You

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.

Topics: Iron, People, Giving, Stock Exchange

What would things been like [in Russia] if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there, paling with terror at every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people?

Topics: Russia, Doors, People, Ambush

Who will dare say he has defined art?

Topics: Art, Dare

Anything too far out of tune with our attitude is lost, either in the ears themselves or somewhere beyond, but it is lost.

Topics: Attitude, Tunes, Ears

Every human act can be disguised with a coating of gilt.

Topics: Behavior, Humans

When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist?

Topics: Why Not, Prison, Graves

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.

Topics: Fate, Abdication, Steps, Calmer

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

Topics: Horse, Rampage, Feds, Old Proverb

Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.

Topics: Men, Careers, Boring

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

Topics: Transition, World, Boundaries, Classification

Only the first swath cut by the scythe is difficult.

Topics: Cutting, Scythes, Firsts

I insist on believing that beauty elevates human beings.

Topics: Beauty, Believe, Humans

The foundation stones of a great building are destined to groan and be pressed upon; it is not for them to crown the edifice.

Topics: Foundation, Crowns, Stones, Edifice

To reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. Such a rejection is more than a political act. It is a protest of our souls against those who would have us forget the concepts of good and evil.

Topics: War, Evil, Political, Inhuman

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.

Topics: Life, Men, Law

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

Topics: Party, Heart, Class

You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power - he's free again.

source: - The First Circle ch. 17 (1968)

Topics: Life, Power, Men

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.

Topics: Selfish, Mistake, Emotion, Being Selfish, We Make Mistakes

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

Topics: Dog, Russia, People, Dead Dog, Communism And Socialism

How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold?

Topics: Men, Compassion, Cold

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.

Topics: Education, Hygiene, Forever, Russian Literature

Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word 'modernity' if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.

Topics: Islamic, Russia, Use, Referring

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

Topics: Yield, Essentials, Would Be, Essential Questions, Anthropocentrism

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

Topics: Believe, Heart

We didn't love freedom enough.

Topics: Enough, Love Freedom

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

Topics: Past, Ungrateful, Favors

Work is what horses die of

Topics: Horse

Oh, how hard it is to part with power! This one has to understand.

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.

Topics: Past, Atrocities, Failing

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.

Topics: Years, Poison, Have Faith, Power Over Others

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

Topics: Time, Names, Air, Contemporary Society

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

Topics: Cold, Warm

Freedom! To fill people's mailboxes, eyes, ears and brains with commercial rubbish against their will, television programs that are impossible to watch with a sense of coherence. Freedom! To force information on people, taking no account of their right not to accept it or their right of peace of mind. Freedom! To spit in the eyes and souls of passersby with advertisements.

Topics: Eye, People, Soul, Mailboxes, Mind Freedom

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

Topics: Telling The Truth, Realism, Socialist, Solemn

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

Topics: Ancient, Decline, Ends, Ancient Times

The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.

Topics: Peace, War, Civilization, Western Civilization

Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one's well-being.

Topics: Spiritual, Yield, Long

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

Topics: Religion, Earth, Faces

When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.

Topics: Truth, Honesty, Lying, Attractiveness

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.

Topics: Love, Country, Government

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.

source: - "Thinking About Alexander Solzhenitsyn" by Don Meyer, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 18, 2012.

Topics: Lying, Integrity, Live Your Life, Credo

If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.'

Topics: Men, People, Today

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.

Topics: Determination, Believe, Eye, Social Theory, Natural Law

Modern society is hypnotized by socialism. It is prevented by socialism from seeing the mortal danger it is in. And one of the greatest dangers of all is that you have lost all sense of danger, you cannot even see where it's coming from as it moves swiftly towards you.

Topics: Wisdom, Moving, Politics

Evil people always support each other; that is their chief strength.

Topics: Evil People, Support, Chiefs

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.

Topics: Wisdom, Responsibility, Sacrifice, Selflessness, Western World

Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.

source: - David Mitchell (2012). “Cloud Atlas (Enhanced Movie Tie-in Edition): A Novel”, p.185, Random House Group

Topics: Hands, People, Unlimited, Unlimited Power

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.

Topics: Wisdom, School, Thinking

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.

source: - A World Split Apart, delivered 8 June 1978, Harvard University

Topics: Country, Book, Offering

We have to condemn the very idea that some people have the right to repress others.

Topics: Ideas, People

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

Topics: Law, Morality, Forget

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

source: - Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Anne Applebaum (2007). “The Gulag Archipelago Volume 2: An Experiment in Literary Investigation”, Harper Perennial Modern Classics

Topics: Wisdom, Sacrifice, Evil

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.

Topics: Adversity, Rights, Self

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.

Topics: Mistake, Sacrifice, Endure

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

source: - 1974 interview, printed in appendix to (The Oak and the Calf, 1975)

Topics: Country, Lying, Pillars

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.

Topics: Christian, Religious, Men, Pithy

One drop of truth can outweigh an ocean of lies

Topics: Lying, Ocean

We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.

Topics: Truth, Integrity, Vision, Truth Will Set You Free, Seeing The Truth

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.

source: - A World Split Apart — Commencement Address Delivered At Harvard University, www.orthodoxytoday.org. June 8, 1978.

Topics: Loss, Intellectual, World, Features

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.

Topics: Change, Believe, Needs

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.

Topics: Christian, Spiritual, Responsibility

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.

Topics: Lying, Believe, Maturity

The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles.

source: - Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Anne Applebaum (2007). “The Gulag Archipelago Volume 2: An Experiment in Literary Investigation”, Harper Perennial Modern Classics

Topics: Wisdom, World, Politics, Barbarity

We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others... When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers ... we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

Topics: Ideas, People, Justice

Vladimir Putin inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people. And he started to do what was possible - a slow and gradual restoration. These efforts were not noticed, nor appreciated, immediately. In any case, one is hard pressed to find examples in history when steps by one country to restore its strength were met favorably by other governments.

Topics: Country, People, Effort, Demoralized

The less you speak, the more you will hear.

Topics: People, Speak, Introvert, People Skills

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.

Topics: Race, Enemy, Slugs

You're sincere, but in order not to upset your views you avoid talking with people who think differently. You pick your thoughts from conversations with people like yourself, from books written by people like yourself. In physics they call it resonance. You start out with modest opinions, but they match and build each other up to a scale.

source: - Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1972). “The First Circle”

Topics: Book, Thinking, Views, Resonance

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

Topics: Running, Heart, Men, Struggle Between Good And Evil, Battle Between Good And Evil

Education doesn't make you smarter.

source: - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1991). “Cancer Ward: A Novel”, p.31, Macmillan

Topics: Smarter

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.

source: - Source: www.spiegel.de

Topics: Russia, Europe, Usa

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.

source: - Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Anne Applebaum (2007). “The Gulag Archipelago Volume 2: An Experiment in Literary Investigation”, Harper Perennial Modern Classics

Topics: Lying, Men, Support, Living Alone

The same old caveman feeling-greed, envy, violence, and mutual hate, which along the way assumed respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial struggle, mass struggle, labor-union struggle-are tearing our world to pieces.

Topics: Hate, Struggle, Our World, Pseudonyms, Class Struggle

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.

source: - A World Split Apart, delivered 8 June 1978, Harvard University

Topics: Fashion, Book, College, Thoughts And Ideas

On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis.

source: - A World Split Apart, delivered 8 June 1978, Harvard University

Topics: Spiritual, Atheist, Real, Social Reform, Irresponsibility

... that maxim of Descartes: "Question everything!" Question everything!

Topics: Doubt, Maxims

If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person's mind begins to roam irretrievably. One's fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.

Topics: Mind, Harder, Persons, Martians

The simple act of an ordinary courageous man is not to take part, not to support lies! Let that come into the world and even reign over it, but not through me. Writers and artists can do more: they can vanquish lies! ... Lies can stand up against much in the world, but not against art.

Topics: Art, Lying, Simple, Courageous Man