“Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors. Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. It demands millions of sacrifices in ceaseless civil wars, it drums into our souls that there is no such thing as unchanging, universal concepts of goodness and justice, that they are all fluctuating and inconstant. Therefore the rule — always do what's most profitable to your party. Any professional group no sooner sees a convenient opportunity to BREAK OFF A PIECE, even if it be unearned, even if it be superfluous, than it breaks it off there and then and no matter if the whole of society comes tumbling down.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 28, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased a…" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn photo

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 120

Russian writer 1918–2008

Related quotes

“The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

A Fire on the Moon (1970), Pt. 1, Ch. 1

“Europe is not re-entering its troubled wartime past—on the contrary, it is leaving it. Germany today, like the rest of Europe, is more conscious of its twentieth-century history than at any time in the past fifty years. But this does not mean that it is being drawn back into it. For that history never went away.”

Tony Judt book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

Introduction
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)

“The thirteenth century knew more about religion and decoration than the twentieth century will ever learn.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“Two world wars have destroyed in a few years the material and spiritual capital accumulated by centuries of work. The nineteenth century had hoped to turn man, by virtue of education, into a reasoning being: a half-century of ferocity has proved that a cruel, primitive beast still resides in him.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Loving

“Acknowledging continuities between nineteenth century anti-slavery struggles, twentieth century civil rights struggles, twenty-first century abolitionist struggles—and when I say abolitionist struggles I’m referring to the abolition of imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment, the abolition of the prison industrial complex—acknowledging these continuities requires a challenge to the closures that isolate the freedom movement of the twentieth century from the century preceding and the century following.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and Continuities (2013)

“No one, either in the nineteenth century or the twentieth, has ever built a persuasive case proving that dinosaurs as a whole were more like reptilian crocodiles than warm-blooded birds. No one has done this because it can't be done.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 27
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

“No nineteenth-century writer could have written this nineteenth-century tale; but few twentieth-century writers could have handled its simplicities in the way this one does.”

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957) Sicilian writer and prince

Martin Seymour-Smith Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975) vol. 3, p. 30.
Criticism

“The speed and density of computation have been doubling every three years (at the beginning of the twentieth century) to one year (at the end of the twentieth century), regardless of the type of hardware used. …Despite many decades of progress since the first calculating equipment was used in the 1890 census, it was not until the mid-1960s that this phenomenon was even noticed”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

although Alan Turing had an inkling of it in 1950
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)

“The coming of Buddhism to the West may well prove to be the most important event of the Twentieth Century.”

Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) British historian, author of A Study of History

Lama Surya Das, Awakening the Buddha Within, Broadway Books, NY, 1997.

“If by the quarter of the twentieth century godliness wasn’t next to something more interesting than cleanliness, it might be time to reevaluate our notions of godliness.”

Tom Robbins (1932) American writer

Related topics