Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Trending quotes (page 4)

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

“Violence can only be concealed by a Lie, & the Lie can only be maintained by Violence…. Any man, who has once proclaimed Violence as his Method, is inevitably forced to take the Lie as his Principle”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“… it's only on a black day that you begin to have friends.”

“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.”

“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.”

“… you are strong only as long as you don't deprive people of. For a person you've takenfrom us no longer in your power. He's free all over again.”

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

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

“Beat a dog once and you only have to show him the whip.”

“We didn't love freedom enough.”

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

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

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