Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

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

One should not consider that the great principles of freedom end at your own frontiers, that as long as you have freedom, let the rest have pragmatism. No! Freedom is indivisible and one has to take a moral attitude towards it.

A person who is not inwardly prepared for the use of violence against him is always weaker than the person committing the violence. There

We are all human, and our senses are quicker to prompt us than our reason. Every man gives off a scent, and that scent tells you how to act before your head does.

A hard life improves the vision.

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.

But we don't pray for that, I pray that I may do the will of God here. Give us this day ...

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.

Those who floated in the ark were weightless and had weightless thoughts. They were neither hungry nor satisfied. They had no happiness and no fear of losing it. Their heads were not filled with petty official calculations, intrigues, promotions, and their shoulders were not burdened with concerns about housing, fuel, bread, and clothes for the children. Love, which from time immemorial has been the delight and the torment of humanity, was powerless to communicate to them its thrill or its agony. Their prison terms were so long that no one even thought of the time when he would go out into freedom. Men with exceptional Intellect, education, and experience, but too devoted to their families to have much of themselves left over for their friends, here belonged only to friends.

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

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

When the whole discussion of "developing a national idea" hastily began in post-Soviet Russia, I tried to pour cold water on it with the objection that, after all the devastating losses we had experienced, it would be quite sufficient to have just one task: the preservation of a dying people.

When Russia started to regain some of its strength as an economy and as a state, the West's reaction - perhaps a subconscious one, based on erstwhile fears - was panic.

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.

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
and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil.
Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

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

No one on this earth ever says anything 'once and for all.' If they did, life would come to a stop and succeeding generations would have nothing to say.

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

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 ...

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.

We like to take our anger out on those who are weaker, those who cannot answer. It is a human trait. And somehow the arguments to prove we are right appear out of nowhere.

All Communist Parties, upon attaining power, have become completely merciless. But at the stage before they achieve power, it is necessary to use disguises.

The days rolled by in the camp - they were over before you could say "knife." But the years, they never rolled by; they never moved by a second.

I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write.

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.

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.

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

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

Religion itself cannot but be dynamic. In order to combat modern materialistic mores, to fight nihilism and egotism, religion must also develop, must be flexible in its forms, and it must have a correlation with the cultural forms of the epoch.

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.

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

That bowl of soup - it was dearer than freedom, dearer than life itself, past, present, and future.

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

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

A forest doesn't weep over one tree.

We will die, but art will remain.

Your friend will argue with you.

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

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.

All history is one continuous pestilence. There is no truth and there is no illusion. There is nowhere to appeal and nowhere to go.

A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy.

Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state into another.

But in every case, out of all the cells you've been in, your first cell is a very special one, the place where you first encountered others like yourself, doomed to the same fate. All your life you will remember it with an emotion that you otherwise experience only in remembering your first love. And those people, who shared with you the floor and air of that stone cubicle during those days when you rethought your entire life, will from time to time be recollected by you as members of your own family.
Yes, in those days they were your only family.
What you experience in your first interrogation cell parallels nothing in your entire previous life or your whole subsequent life

Prayers are like those appeals of ours. Either they don't get through or they're returned with 'rejected' scrawled across 'em.

That's why there's a devil - to judge the priests.

... I have no knowledge of the world so I read in peace.

You know, there was a time at the beginning of the 50's when this nuclear threat hung over the world, but the attitude of the West was like granite and the West did not yield. Today, this nuclear threat still hangs on both sides, but the West has chosen the wrong path of making concessions.

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

A human being," Kondrasev continued, "possesses from his birth a certain essence, the nucleus, as it were, of the human being. His 'I'. And it's still uncertain which forms which: whether life forms the man or man, with his strong spirit, forms his life! Because" - Kondrashev-Ivanov suddenly lowered his voice and leaned toward Nerzhin, who was again sitting on the block - "because he has something to measure himself against, something he can look to. Because he has in him an image of perfection which in rare moments suddenly emerges before his spiritual gaze.

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.

Any country that is not careful can be seized.

The root destruction of religion in the country, which throughout the twenties and thirties was one of the most important goals of the GPU-NKVD, could be realized only by mass arrests of Orthodox believers. Monks and nuns, whose black habits had been a distinctive feature of Old Russian life, were intensively rounded up on every hand, placed under arrest, and sent into exile. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all and who, for many long years to come, would be called 'nuns' in transit prisons and in camps.

True, they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and for bringing up their children in the same spirit. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote:

You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear.

(She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.) A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children! In the twenties the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code--in other words, counterrevolutionary propaganda! True, one was permitted to renounce one's religion at one's trial: it didn't often happen but it nonetheless did happen that the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children wh

We particularly like people who value us highly.

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.

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

And yet, until I came to the West myself and spent two years looking around, I could never have imagined the extreme degree to which the West actually desired to blind itself to the world situation, the extreme degree to which the West had already become a world without a will, a world gradually petrifying in the face of the danger confronting it, a world oppressed above all by the need to defend its freedom.

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

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

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

Let your memory be your travel bag.

Shukhov ate his supper without bread
a double portion and bread on top of it would be too rich. So he'd save the bread. You get no thanks from your belly
it always forgets what you've just done for it and comes begging again the next day.

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

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.

Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?

The central government possesses no plan of finding the way out of this blind alley.

For me and my friends, for people who think the way I do over there, for all ordinary Soviet citizens, America evokes a mixture of admiration and compassion...You're a country of the future, a young country, with yet untapped possiblities, enormous territory, great breadth of spirit, generosity, magnanimity. But these qualities - strength, generosity, and magnanimity - are usually combined in a man and even in a whole country with trustfulness. And this has already done you a disservice several times.

Who will dare say he has defined art?

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.

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

Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme.

The Rusanovs loved the People, their great People. They served the People and were ready to give their lives for the People. But as the years went by they found themselves less and less able to tolerate actual human beings, those obstinate creatures who were always resistant, refusing to do what they were told to and, besides, demanding something for themselves.

I leaf through the ancient philosophers and find my newest discoveries there.

In military science there is a principle more important than "Forward": it is that the task should be proportionate to the means.

Whether you like it or not, the course of your (America's) history has made you the leaders of the world. Your country can no longer think provincially.

...she knew from school that that sort of literature was boring: Gorky was correct but somehow ponderous; Mayakovsky was very correct but somehow awkward; Saltykov-Shchedrin was progressive, but you could die yawning if you tried to read him through; Turgenev was limited to his nobleman's ideals; Goncharov was associated with the beginnings of Russian capitalism; Lev Tolstoi came to favor patriarchal peasantry - and their teacher did not recommend reading Tolstoi's novels because they were very long and only confused the clear critical essays written about him. And then they reviewed a batch of writers totally unknown to anyone: Dostoyevsky, Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, and Sukhovo-Kobylin. It was true that one did not even have to remember the titles of their works. In all this long procession, only Pushkin shone like a sun.

As he left the room it seemed to him that he was walking between two eternities, on one side a list of the living, with its inevitable crossings-out, on the other - eternal exile. Eternal as the stars, as the galaxies.

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

You are strong only as long as you don't deprive people of everything. For a person you've taken everything from is no longer in your power. He's free all over again.

Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of "good" and "evil" as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative, to be a class matter. Depending on circumstances and the political situation, any act, including murder, even the killing of hundreds of thousands, could be good or could be bad. It all depends on class ideology. And who defines this ideology? The whole class cannot get together to pass judgment. A handful of people determine what is good and what is bad. But I must say that in this respect Communism has been most successful. It has infected the whole world with the belief in the relativity of good and evil. Today, many people apart from the Communists are carried away by this idea.

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.

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

We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, and 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 thousand fold in the future.

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

First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.

Writers haven't got any rockets to blast off. We don't even trundle the most insignificant auxiliary vehicle. We haven't got any military might. So what can literature do in the face of the merciless onslaught of open violence? One word of truth outweighs the whole world.

And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest.
Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?
The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest"
If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?

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. - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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

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).

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

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

It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that "revolution must necessarily begin with atheism." That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot.

But this became the first plan of his life to fail. God told him - apparently with the help of human hands - to depart from his ribcage.

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

In the First World War we lost in all about three million killed. In the Second we lost twenty million (so Khrushchev said; according to Stalin it was only seven million. Was Nikita being too generous? Or couldn't Iosif keep track of his capital?) All those odes! All those obelisks and eternal flames! Those novels and poems! For a quarter of a century all Soviet literature has been drunk on that blood!

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.

Making no attempt to conceal his hope that he, a son of the Russian people, might also be cured by this simple Russian folk remedy. He spoke with no trace of hostility - he didn't want to irritate Bone-chewer - yet there was a reminder in his voice. "But is this method officially recognized?" he asked. "Has it been approved by a government department?

She was wonderful, in spite of everything she was wonderful.

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