Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes
When you're young, you haven't the experience, when you're old you haven't the strength.
How quickly a zek (a prisoner) gets cheeky-or, putting it in literary language, how quickly a man's requirements grow.
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.
If you wanted to put the world to rights, who should you begin with: yourself or others?
Happiness doesn't depend on the actual number of blessings we manage to scratch from life, only our attitude towards them.
The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe
I dare hope that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history.
The one who doesn't pull his weight is not asked to pull, while the one who does, pulls for two.
Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme.
It was wrong to be too pragmatic, to judge people solely by results; it was more humane to judge by intentions.
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.
Let us drive away those cruel, greedy oppressors, governments, and the new ones, having just laid aside grenades and rifles, will be just and understanding. Far from it.
Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one's well-being.
Art thaws even the frozen, darkened soul, opening it to lofty spiritual experience.
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.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
...it's only on a black day that you begin to have friends.
When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.
It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
Truth must be told-and things must change! If words are not about real things and do not cause things to happen, what is the good of them?
Human nature, if it changes at all, changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth.
... mutual lack of understanding carries the threat of imminent and violent destruction.
One can build the Empire State Building, discipline the Prussian army, make a state hierarchy mightier than God, yet fail to overcome the unaccountable superiority of certain human beings.
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.
...skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.
If we could all take a sober look at our history, then we would no longer see this nostalgic attitude to the Soviet past that predominates among the less affected part of our society.
When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps.
I will tell you something else: it is a major responsibility not only of portraiture but of all human communication for each of us to help everyone else discover the best that is in him.
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.
Oh, how hard it is to part with power! This one has to understand.
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.
Freedom or prison--what's the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.
