Alexandre Soljenitsyne citations (140 citations, Page 3)

Contestable philosophie, certainement. Il serait plus sûr de répondre : ne m'apprends pas à périr à ta façon, laisse moi périr à la mienne. Seulement, voilà, de toute façon ils ne vous laisseront pas…
L’Archipel du Goulag

“Une patrie qui a trahi ses soldats, est-ce vraiment la Patrie?”

Alexandre Soljenitsyne

L’Archipel du Goulag

Alexandre Soljenitsyne: Citations en anglais

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

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn livre Une journée d'Ivan Denissovitch

Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)

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

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn livre Une journée d'Ivan Denissovitch

Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)

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

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“… 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.”

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn livre The First Circle

Source: The First Circle

“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.”

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Source: The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

“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.”

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn livre 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.”

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Source: The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

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

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Source: The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

“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.”

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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".

“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.”

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn livre Une journée d'Ivan Denissovitch

Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

“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.”

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn livre Une journée d'Ivan Denissovitch

Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

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

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn livre Le Pavillon des cancéreux

Source: Cancer Ward

“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”

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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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.”

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn livre The First Circle

Source: The First Circle

“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.”

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“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.”

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn livre The Oak and the Calf

The Oak and the Calf (1975)

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

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

“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.”

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Harvard University address (1978)

“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.”

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Peace and Violence" (1973).

“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.”

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

“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.”

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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)
Contexte: 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.

“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.”

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Nobel lecture (1970)

“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.”

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

“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.”

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn livre The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago (1973).

“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?”

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Harvard University address (1978)

“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 be 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. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.”

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Harvard University address (1978)

“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.
Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by occasional outbursts and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments and with countries that lack support, or with doomed currents which clearly cannot offer resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.
Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Variant translation: A loss of courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days...
Harvard University address (1978)

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

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

As quoted in The Observer (29 December 1974).