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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

Total quotes: 74
“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, Warning to the West
Tagged: Communism, Marx
“Communism is as crude an attempt to explain society and the individual as if a surgeon were to perform his delicate operations with a meat ax.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Tagged: Communism
“At the present time it is widely accepted among lawyers that law is higher than morality—law is something which is shaped and developed, whereas morality is something inchoate and amorphous. This is not the case. The opposite is true: morality is higher than law! Law is our human attempt to embody in rules a part of that moral sphere which is above us. We try to understand this morality, bring it down to earth, and present it in the form of law. Sometimes we are more successful, sometimes less. Sometimes we have a mere caricature of morality, but morality is always higher than law. This view must never be abandoned.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West
Tagged: Morality, Law, Lawyers
“If a person can build a fence around himself, he is bound to do it.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle
Tagged: Isolation, Borders, Fences
“Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle
Tagged: King Midas, Stalin, Communism
“If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle
Tagged: Totalitarianism, Caution, Human Condition
“One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them 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.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
Tagged: Happiness, affection
“Listen to me, he said, do you really think women are the flower of life? You know, you can get fed up with them after a while … All they do is stop you achieving anything serious.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
Tagged: Misogyny
“One word of truth outweighs the whole world.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture
Tagged: Truth
“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.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
Tagged: Capitalism
“Surely people should eventually cease to be surprised at anything? And yet they continue to be.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
“What is an optimist? The man who says, 'It's worse everywhere else. We're better off than the rest of the world. We've been lucky.' He is happy with things as they are and he doesn't torment himself.

What is a pessimist? The man who says, 'Things are fine everywhere but here. Everyone else is better off than we are. We're the only ones who've had a bad break.' He torments himself continually.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
Tagged: Optimism, Pessimism
“Like a bicycle, like a wheel that, once rolling, is stable only so long as it keeps moving but falls when its momentum stops, so the game between a man and woman, once begun, can exist only so long as it progresses. If the forward movement today is no more than it was yesterday, the game is over.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
Tagged: Gender war
“The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
Tagged: Soul
“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.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
Tagged: Lies
“You only have power over people as 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.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
Tagged: Power, Freedom
“Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: Socialism
“At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church — none of them has been able to stop it. And don't succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state's essential functions.…War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from evil. In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses—but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction—and that is war.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: War, Statism, Evil
“For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: Communism, Russia
“Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, God
“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.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: History
“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
Tagged: Justice, Conscience, humanity
“I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances—from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer’s pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: Writing
“Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers—such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: Literature
“At no time have governments been moralists. They never imprisoned people and executed them for having done something. They imprisoned and executed them to keep them from doing something. They imprisoned all those POW's, of course, not for treason to the motherland, because it was absolutely clear even to a fool that only the Vlasov men could be accused of treason. They imprisoned all of them to keep them from telling their fellow villagers about Europe. What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve for.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Government, Moralists, Prison, Totalitarian
“That Marxism is not a science is entirely clear to intelligent people in the Soviet Union. One would even feel awkward to refer to it as a science. Leaving aside the exact sciences, such as physics, mathematics, and the natural sciences, even the social sciences can predict an event—when, in what way and how an event might occur. Communism has never made any such forecasts. It has never said where, when, and precisely what is going to happen. Nothing but declamations. Rhetoric to the effect that the world proletariat will overthrow the world bourgeoisie and the most happy and radiant society will then arise.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Marxism, Communism
“Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren't.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
“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, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Justice, Revenge
“Human nature, if it changes at all, changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Human Nature
“Thanks to ideology the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing calculated on a scale in the millions.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Ideologies, Democide, Evil
“Here is a riddle not for us contemporaries to figure out: Why is Germany allowed to punish its evildoers and Russia is not? What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us if we do not have the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside our body? What, then, can Russia teach the world?”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Nazi Germany, Communist Atrocities, Russia
“That is the precise line the Shakespearean evildoer could not cross. But the evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and clear.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Ideology, Evil, shakespeare, Villains
“The solemn pledge to abstain from telling the truth was called socialist realism.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Truth, Lies, Socialism, Socialist Realism
“Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state into another.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Prison, Arrest, Police
“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.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Power
“Oh, how hard it is to part with power! This one has to understand.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Power
“Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Cowardice, Sacrifice
“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.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Arrest, Prison, Resistance, Jail
“Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.' Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible 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 have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: atheism, Communism, Russia
“We didn't love freedom enough.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Freedom, Communism
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