Quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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

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

Skepticism is a way of freeing the dogmatic mind, and that's where its value lies.

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

People who are at ease with their consciences always look happy.

It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.

A horrible human toll the Russian Orthodox Church suffered throughout almost the entire 20th century. The Church is just rising from its knees. Our young post-Soviet state is just learning to respect the Church as an independent institution.

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.

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

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.

History is too slow for our life, for our hearts.

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

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

When things are too clear, they are no longer interesting.

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

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

This is a grave danger: the stoppage of information between the parts of the planet. Contemporary science knows that such stoppage is the way of entropy, of universal destruction.

You know the words from the Bible: 'Build not on sand, but on rock....' Tyrant leaders respect only firmness...and laugh at persons who give in to them.

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

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.

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

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

That maxim of Descartes: Question everything! Question everything!

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

Let your work warm you up, that was your only salvation.

The task must be to banish from mankind's thought the idea that anybody has the right to use force against righteousness, against justice, against mutual agreements.

Sometimes I feel quite distinctly that what is inside me is not all of me. There is something else, sublime, quite indestructible, some tiny fragment of the Universal spirit.Don't you feel that?

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

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

Cracks make caves collapse.

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

Economic growth is not only unncessary, but ruinous.

We wanted to recreate inside ourselves our former front-line self-assurance. We were pups and we did not understand to what extent the Archipelago was unlike the front, to what degree its war of siege was more difficult than our war of explosives.

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

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.

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

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.

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

​Those prisoners who had been in Buchenwald and survived were, in fact, imprisoned for that very reason in our own camps: How could you have survived an annihilation camp? Something doesn't smell right!​

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.

The essence of life will never be captured by even the greatest of formulas.

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.

Only an extraordinary person can turn opportunity into reality.

If there were no executioners, there would be no executions.

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

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.

Some are bound to die young. By dying young a person stays young in people's memory. If he burns brightly before he dies, his brightness shines for all time.

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.

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

We always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.

The very concept of happiness is conditional, a fiction.

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

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

We didn't love freedom enough.

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.

But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own.

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

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.

A whole week, a single campaign, a month, a week, even a day was far more than enough to cut a company or platoon to ribbons or cripple a man for life: it needed only a quarter of an hour.

Only the first swath cut by the scythe is difficult.

Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble -- and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

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.

Given that interrogations had ceased to be an attempt to get at the truth, for the interrogators in difficult cases they became a mere exercise of their duties as executioners and in easy cases simply a pastime and a basis for receiving a salary.

One world, one mankind cannot exist in the face of six, four or even two scales of values: We shall be torn apart by this disparity of rhythm, this disparity of vibrations.

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

An engineer cannot participate in irrationality.

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

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

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

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).

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

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.

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

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.

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.

The heart senses who is friend and who is no friend.

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.

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.

All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the Nineteenth Century.

Society must cease to look upon 'progress' as something desirable. 'Eternal Progress' is a nonsensical myth. What must be implemented is not a 'steadily expanding economy', but a zero growth economy, a stable economy. Economic growth is not only unnecessary but ruinous.

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

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.

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.

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.

There is something predetermined in the mutual attraction between Germany and Russia. Otherwise, this attraction would not have survived two ghastly World Wars.

Scientific research? Only when not at the cost of ethics-and first of all, those of the researchers themselves.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction.

At that time the authorities used to love to set up their concentration camps in former monasteries: they were enclosed by strong walls, and had good building, and they were empty. (After all, monks are not human beings and could be tossed out at will.).

No one, even as a joke, could call a member of the all-Union Communist Party a Neo-Hegelian, a Neo-Kantian, a Subjectivist, an Agnostic, or, God forbid, a Revisionist. But epicurean sounded so harmless it could not possibly imply that one was not an orthodox Marxist.

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.

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

Armor-piercing shells for iron-heads have not yet been invented! In arguing with them, you wear yourself out, unless you accept in advance that the argument is simply a game, a jolly pastime.

Any fool can bomb a train, but just try sorting out the mess.

If state, party and social policy will not be based on morality, then mankind has no future to speak of.

A strong man never loses his head in defeat or despondency.

The wind whistles over the bare steppe -- hot and dry in the summer, freezing in winter. Nothing has ever been known to grow on that steppe, least of all between four barbed-wire fences.

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.

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?

Patriotism means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation, which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins, and penitence for them.

Should a man, to preserve his life, pay everything that gives life colour, scent and excitement? Can one accept a life of digestion, respiration, muscular and brain activity -- and nothing more? Become a walking blueprint? Is this not an exorbitant price? Is it not mockery?

Finally, he gave up trying to quiet her and lit a cigarette, the last resort of a man who finds himself in an intolerably stupid position.

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

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

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.

Moscow was an enormous city, but there was nowhere to go in it.

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

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.

The less you speak, the more you will hear.

Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.

Freedom or prison -- what's the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.