Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes
If one is a professional soldier, it is part of one's job to die sooner or later.
One should not ascribe the evil deeds of individual leaders or political regimes to an innate fault of the Russian people and their country.
To his and everybody else's way of thinking, you should build a house with your own hands before you start talking about being an engineer.
Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad.
... We brush aside all scales not our own, as if they were follies or delusions.
In military science there is a principle more important than "Forward": it is that the task should be proportionate to the means.
To preserve his life, should a man pay everything that gives it color, scent and excitement?
There is a law of time, a law of oblivion: glory to the dead; life to the living.
First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.
The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul.
Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.
All history is one continuous pestilence. There is no truth and there is no illusion. There is nowhere to appeal and nowhere to go.
in order to do evil, must first believe that what they are doing is good, otherwise they can't do it.
Freedom meant one thing to him—home.But they wouldn't let him go home.
And this man, who had sailed round Europe and navigated the Great Northern Route, leaned happily over half a ladleful of thin oatmeal kasha, cooked entirely without fat - just oats and water.
And we, from the whole of our life experience there, have concluded that there is only one way to withstand violence: with firmness.
All Communist Parties, upon attaining power, have become completely merciless. But at the stage before they achieve power, it is necessary to use disguises.
The Communist leaders respect only firmness and have contempt for persons who continually give in to them.
Work, he said, was a first-rate medicine for any illness.
The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
The harder life is for a man when he is young, the easier it will be in the future.
The concept of maximum promotion of human rights to the expense of the majority of people in fact undermines the entire concept of the human community.
Thus it is that no cruelty whatsoever passes by without impact. Thus it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.
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 biengs.
When you have robbed a man of everything he is no longer in your power. He is free again.
Fools take to themselves the respect that is given to their office. Aesop It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
Talent is always conscious of its own abundance and does not object to sharing.
No one can bar the road to truth and to advance its cause I'm ready to accept even death.