Solzhenitsyn Quotes

Work is what horses die of. Everybody should know that. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Inequality is the deepest of problems, built into the structure of reality itself, and will not be solved by the presumptuous, ideology-inspiring retooling of the rare free, stable and productive democracies of the world. ~ Jordan B. Peterson

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

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? ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You can build the Empire State Building. Train the Prussian army. Elevate the hierarchy of a totalitarian state higher than the throne of the Most High.
But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

... "the historical necessity of development" -- you can spout that nonsense about anything and you'll always be right. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

What you had to have is usually tabulated as follows: luck; the ability to adapt, immediately and radically; a talent for inconspicuousness; solidarity with another individual or with a group; the preservation of decency ("the people who had no tenets to live by - of whatever nature - generally succumbed" no matter how ruthlessly they struggled); the constantly nurtured conviction of innocence (an essential repeatedly emphasised by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago); immunity to despair; and, again, luck. ~ Martin Amis

Shukhov had figured it all out. If he didn't sign he'd be shot. If he signed he'd still get a chance to live. So he signed. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

And as soon as you have renounced that aim of "surviving at any price" and gone where the calm and simple people go - then imprisonment begins to transform your former character in an astonishing way. To transform it in a direction most unexpected to you.
And it would seem that in this situation feelings of malice, the disturbance of being oppressed, aimless hate, irritability, and nervousness ought to multiply. But you yourself do not notice how, with the impalpable flow of time, slavery nurtures in you the shoots of contradictory feelings.
Once upon a time you were sharply intolerant. You were constantly in a rush. And you were constantly short of time. And now you have time with interest. You are surfeited with it, with its months and its years, behind you and ahead of you - and a beneficial calming fluid pours through your blood vessels - patience.
You are acending...
Formerly you never forgave anyone. You judged people without mercy. And you praised people with equal lack of moderation. And now an understanding mildness has become the basis of your uncategorical judgements. You have come to realize your own weakness - and you can therefore understand the weakness of others. And be astonished at another's strength. And wish to possess it yourself.
The stones rustle beneath our feet. We are ascending...
With the year, armor-plated restraint covers your heart and all your skin. You do not hasten to question and you do not hasten to answer. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The fewer limitations the artist imposes on his work, the less chance he has for artistic success. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society ... loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They kept returning to the same things. A single idea keeps stirring. Would they feel that piece of bread in the mattress? Would he have any luck in the dispensary that evening? Would they out Buinovsky in the cells? And how did Tsezar get his hands on that warm vest? ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We are so attached to the earth, and yet we are incapable of holding onto it. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

According to Roy Medvedev, Stalin's victims numbered forty million. Solzhenitsyn says the number is far greater - perhaps sixty million. The debate continues even now. ~ David Remnick

Just as a star suddenly flares to a hundred times its previous brightness -- and then fades away, so, too, a human being not disposed to be a political may nonetheless flare up briefly and intensely in prison and perish as a result. Ordinarily we do not learn about these cases. Sometimes there is a witness to tell about them. Sometimes there is merely a faded piece of paper in front of us on which we can only build hypothesis; ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I was profoundly impressed by my contact with these places which are and have always been, the wellsprings of your history. It makes one think that the men who created your country never lost sight of their moral bearings. They did not laugh at the absolute nature of the concepts of "good" and "evil." Their practical policies were checked against their moral compass. And how surprising it is that a practical policy computed on the basis of moral considerations turned out to be the most farsighted and the most salutary. This is true even though in the short term one may wonder: Why all this morality? Let's just get on with the immediate job. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If it goes well with you, then all is well. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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

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

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing? ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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

If you always look over your shoulder, how can you still remain human? ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Children write essays in school about the unhappy, tragic, doomed life of Anna Karenina. But was Anna really unhappy? She chose passion and she paid for her passion - that's happiness! She was a free, proud human being. But what if during peacetime a lot of greatcoats and peaked caps burst into the house where you were born and live, and ordered the whole family to leave house and town in twenty-four hours, with only what your feeble hands can carry?... You open your doors, call in the passers-by from the streets and ask them to buy things from you, or to throw you a few pennies to buy bread with... With ribbon in her hair, your daughter sits down at the piano for the last time to play Mozart. But she bursts into tears and runs away. So why should I read Anna Karenina again? Maybe it's enough - what I've experienced. Where can people read about us? Us? Only in a hundred years?
"They deported all members of the nobility from Leningrad. (There were a hundred thousand of them, I suppose. But did we pay much attention? What kind of wretched little ex-nobles were they, the ones who remained? Old people and children, the helpless ones.) We knew this, we looked on and did nothing. You see, we weren't the victims."
"You bought their pianos?"
"We may even have bought their pianos. Yes, of course we bought them."
Oleg could now see that this woman was not yet even fifty. Yet anyone walking past her would have said she was an old woman. A lock of smooth old woman's ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

What is the most precious thing in the world? I see now that it is the knowledge that you have no part in injustice. Injustice is stronger than you, it always was and always will be, but let it not be done through you. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Easy money had no weight: you didn't feel you'd earned it. What you get for a song you won't have for long, the old folks used to say, and they were right. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is almost always impossible to evaluate at the time events which you have already experienced, and to understand their meaning with the guidance of their effects. All the more unpredictable and surprising to us will be the course of future events. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

What's worse than cancer? Leprosy. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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 ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Another example is the modern political order. Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction. Anyone who has read a novel by Charles Dickens knows that the liberal regimes of nineteenth-century Europe gave priority to individual freedom even if it meant throwing insolvent poor families in prison and giving orphans little choice but to join schools for pickpockets. Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism's egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of daily life. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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

It even reached a point of such confusion that men and women were imprisoned in the same cells and used the latrine bucket in each other's presence - who cared about those niceties? Give up your gold, vipers! The interrogators did not write up charge sheets because no one needed their papers. And whether or not a sentence would be pasted on was of very little interest. Only one thing was important: Give up your gold, viper! The state needs gold and you don't. The interrogators had neither voice nor strength left to threaten and torture; they had one universal method: feed the prisoners nothing but salty food and give them no water. Whoever coughed up gold got water! One gold piece for a cup of fresh water!
People perish for cold metal. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We will die, but art will remain. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

In his 1973 "literary investigation," The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn exposed the practices of the Soviet penal system: "If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the 'secret brand'); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums. ~ Donnie Eichar

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

That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality.
That's all. And neither for the first hour nor for the first day will you be able to grasp anything else.
Except that in your desperation the fake circus moon will blink at you: "It's a mistake! They'll set things right!"
And everything which is by now comprised in the traditional, even literary, image of an arrest will pile up and take shape, not in your own disordered memory, but in what your family and your neighbors in your apartment remember: The sharp nighttime ring or the rude knock at the door.
The insolent entrance of the unwiped jackboots of the unsleeping State Security operatives. The frightened and cowed civilian witness at their backs. (And what function does this civilian witness serve? The victim doesn't even dare think about it and the operatives don't remember, but that's what the regulations call for, and so he has to sit there all night long and sign in the morning. 1 For the witness, jerked from his bed, it is torture too - to go out night after night to help arrest his own neighbors and acquaintances. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We are told: "We should not protect those who are unable to defend themselves with their own human resources." But against the overwhelming forces of totalitarianism, when all of this power is thrown against a country - no country can defend itself with its own resources. For instance, Japan doesn't have a standing army.

We are told: "We should not protect those who do not have a full democracy." This is the most remarkable argument of all. This is the leitmotif I hear in your newspapers and in the speeches of some of your political leaders. Who in the world, when on the front line of defense against totalitarianism, has ever been able to sustain a full democracy? You, the united democracies of the world, were not able to sustain it. America, England, France, Canada, Australia together did not sustain it. At the first threat of Hitlerism, you stretched out your hands to Stalin. You call that sustaining democracy? Hardly. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

World's most widely read books. In the years that followed, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anchee Min, and Dith Pran shared their harrowing memories of the communist nightmares in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia. ~ Steven Pinker

It was wrong to be too pragmatic, to judge people solely by results; it was more humane to judge by intentions. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

As the two-thousand-year-old saying goes, you can have eyes and still not see. But a hard life improves vision. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

An engineer cannot participate in irrationality ... ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

In the Cold War, the West celebrated dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and Vaclav Havel, who had the courage to challenge the Soviet system from within. Today, there are many dissidents who challenge Islam – former Muslims, and reformers – but the West either ignores them or dismisses them as "not representative." This is a grave mistake. Reformers must be supported and protected. They should be as well known as Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and Havel were in the 1980s – and as well known as Locke and Voltaire were their day, when the West needed freethinkers of its own. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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

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

We particularly like people who value us highly. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Even the most rational approach to ethics is defenseless if there isn't the will to do what is right. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

We never know beforehand how new posts or new work will change us. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Work was like a stick. It had two ends. When you worked for the knowing you gave them quality; when you worked for a fool you simply gave him eyewash. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Nineteenth-century Russian literature, swooning with compassion for the suffering brother, had created for Nerzhin, and for everyone reading it for the first time, the image of a haloed, silvery-haired People, embodying all wisdom, moral purity, and spiritual grandeur.
But that was far away, on bookshelves; it was somewhere else, in the villages and fields at the crossroads of the nineteenth century. The heavens unfolded, the twentieth century came, and those places had long since ceased to exist under Russian skies. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We didn't love freedom enough. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

... History sometimes does know revenge, a sort of voluptuous and delayed justice, but chooses strange forms for it and unexpected executors of its will. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Shukhov gazed at the ceiling in silence. Now he didn't know whether he wanted freedom or not. At first he'd longed for it. Every night he'd counted the days of his stretch - how many had passed, how many were coming. And then he'd grown bored with counting. And then it became clear that men like him wouldn't ever be allowed to return home, that they'd be exiled. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Beat a dog once and you only have to show him the whip. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A human being is all hope and impatience. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn