Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes (120 quotes, page 2)

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Heart

“… 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.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book The First Circle

Source: The First Circle

People , Strong , Personality

“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.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Source: The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Past

“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

Letter to three students (October 1967) as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz (1970) “The Struggle Intensifies".

Justice , Personality

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book The First Circle

Source: The First Circle

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Source: The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Source: The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Understanding , Parting

“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

Letter to the Secretariat of the Soviet Writers’ Union (12 November 1969) as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz (1970) “Expulsion".

Time

“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 book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Fools

“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.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Thinking , Time

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book Cancer Ward

Source: Cancer Ward

Life

“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”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Lie

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Source: The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

“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.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book The First Circle

Source: The First Circle

Sense

“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

Feeling , People , Happiness

“I was in a state of witless shock, as though flames had suddenly enwrapped and paralyzed me so that for a moment I had no mind, no memory.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book The Oak and the Calf

The Oak and the Calf (1975)

Memory

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

BBC Radio broadcast, Russian service, as quoted in The Listener (15 February 1979).

People , Dogs , Communication , Dead

“Harvard's motto is "Veritas." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Harvard University address (1978)

Truth

“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but 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.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Peace and Violence" (1973).

Truth , Lie , Selfishness

“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

Open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers’ Congress (16 May 1967) “The Struggle Intensifies,” Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, ed. Leopold Labedz (1970).

Pain , People , Fear , Confidence

“We shall be told: what can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Variant translation: Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and 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 quoted in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1974) edited by Leopold Labedz
Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: We shall be told: what can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.

Literature , Support , Nature , Forgetting

“What then is the place and role of the writer in this cruel, dynamic, split world on the brink of its ten destructions? After all we have nothing to do with letting off rockets, we do not even push the lowliest of hand-carts, we are quite scorned by those who respect only material power. Is it not natural for us too to step back, to lose faith in the steadfastness of goodness, in the indivisibility of truth, and to just impart to the world our bitter, detached observations: how mankind has become hopelessly corrupt, how men have degenerated, and how difficult it is for the few beautiful and refined souls to live amongst them?
But we have not even recourse to this flight. Anyone who has once taken up the WORD can never again evade it; a writer is not the detached judge of his compatriots and contemporaries, he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his native land or by his countrymen.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Nobel lecture (1970)

Men , Truth , World , Faith

“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

"How We Must Rebuild Russia" in Komsomolskaya Pravda (18 September 1990).

Communication

“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.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago (1973).

Imagination

“But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive, you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Harvard University address (1978)

Smile , Feeling , Decision , Evil

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

As quoted in The Observer (29 December 1974).

Lie , Country

“Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In his interview with Joseph Pearce. " An Interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0172.html." St. Austin Review 2 no. 2 (February, 2003).
Interview with Joseph Pearce, Sr. (2003)

God

“The disappearance of nations would impoverish us no less than if all peoples were made alike, with one character, one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, they are its generalized personalities: the smallest of them has its own particular colors, and embodies a particular facet of God's design.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Harvard University address (1978)

God , People , Color , Personality

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago (1973).

People , Evil , Heart

“I am of course confident that I will fulfil 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

Open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers’ Congress (16 May 1967); as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz (1970).

Death , Truth , Confidence , History

“A work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force — they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Nobel lecture (1970)

Truth , Age , Art , Appearance

“Call no day happy 'til it is done; call no man happy til he is dead.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book The Oak and the Calf

Solzhenitsyn here seems to be paraphrasing Sophocles who expresses similar ideas in Oedipus Rex. This is also a direct reference to Plutarch's line, "call no man fortunate until he is dead," from his "Parallel Lives".
The Oak and the Calf (1975)

Dead , Happiness

“A man should build a house with his own hands before he calls himself an engineer.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)

Housing

“A man with two trades to his credit can easily learn another ten.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)

Learning

“Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to form a herd, shutting off successful development.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Harvard University address (1978)

Life , People , Books , Way

“Ivanov came to quite the same conclusion, though life supplied him with quite different material to think about. He puts it like this: many lives have a mystical sense, but not everyone reads it right; more often than not it is given to us in cryptic form, and when we fail to decipher it we despair because our lives seem meaningless… the secret of a great life is often a man’s success in deciphering the mysterious symbols vouchsafed to him, understanding them, and so learning to walk in the true path.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book The Oak and the Calf

The Oak and the Calf (1975)

Life , Secret , Understanding , Thinking

“There is a word very commonly used these days: "anti-communism." It's a very stupid word, badly put together. It makes it appear as though communism were something original, something basic, something fundamental. Therefore, it is taken as the point of departure, and anti-communism is defined in relation to communism. Here is why I say that this word was poorly selected, that it was put together by people who do not understand etymology: the primary, the eternal concept is humanity. And communism is anti-humanity. Whoever says "anti-communism" is saying, in effect, anti-anti-humanity. A poor construction. So we should say: that which is against communism is for humanity. Not to accept, to reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. It isn't being a member of a party.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Speech in Washington D.C., June 30, 1975; Solzhenitsyn: The Voice of Freedom http://www.archive.org/details/SolzhenitsynTheVoiceOfFreedom, p. 30.

People , Stupidity , Communication , Departure

“Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Harvard University address (1978)

Death

“I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less … than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book The Oak and the Calf

The Oak and the Calf (1975)

World , Education , Literature

“However, the most cruel mistake occurred with the failure to understand the Vietnam war. Some people sincerely wanted all wars to stop just as soon as possible; others believed that there should be room for national, or communist, self-determination in Vietnam, or in Cambodia, as we see today with particular clarity. But members of the U. S. anti-war movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear?”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Harvard University address (1978)

War , People , Failure , Understanding

“Proverbs about truth are well-loved in Russian. They give steady and sometimes striking expression to the not inconsiderable harsh national experience: ONE WORD OF TRUTH SHALL OUTWEIGH THE WHOLE WORLD.
And it is here, on an imaginary fantasy, a breach of the principle of the conservation of mass and energy, that I base both my own activity and my appeal to the writers of the whole world.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Nobel lecture (1970)

Love , Truth , World

“One artist sees himself as the creator of an independent spiritual world; he hoists onto his shoulders the task of creating this world, of peopling it and of bearing the all-embracing responsibility for it; but he crumples beneath it, for a mortal genius is not capable of bearing such a burden. Just as man in general, having declared himself the centre of existence, has not succeeded in creating a balanced spiritual system. And if misfortune overtakes him, he casts the blame upon the age-long disharmony of the world, upon the complexity of today's ruptured soul, or upon the stupidity of the public.
Another artist, recognizing a higher power above, gladly works as a humble apprentice beneath God's heaven; then, however, his responsbility for everything that is written or drawn, for the souls which perceive his work, is more exacting than ever. But, in return, it is not he who has created this world, not he who directs it, there is no doubt as to its foundations; the artist has merely to be more keenly aware than others of the harmony of the world, of the beauty and ugliness of the human contribution to it, and to communicate this acutely to his fellow-men. And in misfortune, and even at the depths of existence — in destitution, in prison, in sickness — his sense of stable harmony never deserts him.
But all the irrationality of art, its dazzling turns, its unpredictable discoveries, its shattering influence on human beings — they are too full of magic to be exhausted by this artist's vision of the world, by his artistic conception or by the work of his unworthy fingers.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Nobel lecture (1970)

Men , God , People , Age

“If one looks far into the future, one can foresee in the 21st century such a time when the U.S. together with Europe will be in dire need of Russia as an ally.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Interview With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on Ukraine (May 1994)

Future , Time

“If one recalls the tactless declaration of President Bush about supporting Ukrainian sovereignty even before the referendum on that matter, one must conclude that all this stems from a common aim: to use all means possible, no matter what the consequences, to weaken Russia.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Interview With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on Ukraine (May 1994)

Support

“Why does the (U.S.) State Department decide who should get Sevastopol?”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Interview With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on Ukraine (May 1994)

“Russia today is terribly sick... But even so, have a conscience and don’t demand that–just to please America–Russia throw away the last vestiges of her concern for her security and her unprecedented collapse. After all, this concern in no way threatens the United States.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Interview With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on Ukraine (May 1994)

Way

“Imagine that one not very fine day two or three of your states in the Southwest, in the space of 24 hours, declare themselves independent of the U.S... declare themselves a fully sovereign nation, decreeing that Spanish will be the only language. All English-speaking residents, even if their ancestors have lived there for 200 years, have to take a test in the Spanish language within one or two years and swear allegiance... Otherwise they will not receive citizenship and be deprived of... (their) rights. Today Russia faces precisely this scenario.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Interview With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on Ukraine (May 1994)

Imagination

“Imagine that one not very fine day two or three of your states in the Southwest, in the space of 24 hours, declare themselves independent of the U.S.... declare themselves a fully sovereign nation, decreeing that Spanish will be the only language. All English-speaking residents, even if their ancestors have lived there for 200 years, have to take a test in the Spanish language within one or two years and swear allegiance to the new nation. Otherwise they will not receive citizenship and be deprived of civic, property and employment rights. What would be the reaction of the United States? I have no doubt that it would be immediate military intervention. Today Russia faces precisely this scenario.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Interview With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the New Russia and Ukraine (May 1994)

Imagination

“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.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The Red Wheel

"Father Severyan", in November 1916: The Red Wheel: Knot II (1984; translation 1999).
Context: 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.

War , Evil

“I believe that world literature has it in its power to help mankind, in these its troubled hours, to see itself as it really is, notwithstanding the indoctrinations of prejudiced people and parties.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: I believe that world literature has it in its power to help mankind, in these its troubled hours, to see itself as it really is, notwithstanding the indoctrinations of prejudiced people and parties. World literature has it in its power to convey condensed experience from one land to another so that we might cease to be split and dazzled, that the different scales of values might be made to agree, and one nation learn correctly and concisely the true history of another with such strength of recognition and painful awareness as it had itself experienced the same, and thus might it be spared from repeating the same cruel mistakes.

People , World , Literature , Help