Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own.

One word of truth outweighs the whole world.

Once the fight is on-strike quickly and often.

Why should I trust you? We haven't drunk from the same bowl of soup.

But what can you say in a letter?

For a country to have a great writer is to have another government.

Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.

For me faith is the foundation and support of one's life.

If state, party and social policy will not be based on morality, then mankind has no future to speak of.

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

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

Friends! Let us try to help if we are worth anything at all!

Any fool can bomb a train, but just try sorting out the mess.

I have always had that inner drive, since my birth. And I have always devoted myself gladly to work - to work and to the struggle.

Even the most broad-minded of us can embrace only that part of truth into which our own snout has blundered.

You took my freedom away a long time ago and you can't give it back because you haven't got it yourself.

Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word 'modernity' if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.

... but it is human to be outraged by injustice, even to the point of courting destruction!

I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime.

Thus, literature, together with language, preserves and protects a nation's soul.

Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!

The fewer limitations the artist imposes on his work, the less chance he has for artistic success.

After all, man is a complicated being, why should he be explainable by logic?

It's quite enough to show a well-beaten dog the whip.

The secret is that when you've been pitched head first into hell you just write about it

A leader should not be a man who arbitrarily imported his own ideas but the essential focal point for a group of people who trusted one another and worked for a common aim.

As the fathers live, so the children play.

The essence of life will never be captured by even the greatest of formulas.

... some kind of clean, pure feeling does live within us, existing apart from all our convictions.

Every act of perception has an emotional coloring.

We will die, but art will remain.

The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us...than the need for any external expansion of our power.

I cannot suggest political ways out, that is the task of politicians, so it is simply that those who accuse me of this do not know how to read.

Only a magician can fix a head on a body, but any fool can lop it off.

... a man can safely sacrifice a great deal as long as he clings to the essential.

In every life there is one particular event that is decisive for the entire person-for his fate, his convictions, his passions.

A whole week, a single campaign, a month, a week, even a day was far more than enough to cut a company or platoon to ribbons or cripple a man for life: it needed only a quarter of an hour.

Not death itself, but only the moral preparation for it, holds terrors.

A poet cannot be a Party member ... without paying the price.

We never know beforehand how new posts or new work will change us.

On our crowded planet there are no longer any internal affairs!

If so far we have been unable to see clearly or to reflect the eternal lineaments of truth, is it not because we too are still moving towards some end-because we are still alive?

There is something predetermined in the mutual attraction between Germany and Russia. Otherwise, this attraction would not have survived two ghastly World Wars.

Which of us can control his feelings?

You get no thanks from your belly-it always forgets what you've just done for it and comes begging again the next day.

To taste the sea all one needs is one gulp.

If it goes well with you, then all is well.

Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.

Still, everybody wants to eat.

Prayers are like those appeals of ours. Either they don't get through or they're returned with 'rejected' scrawled across 'em.