Top 300 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

2. “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

3. “Let your memory be your travel bag.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Featured in: Quotes About Memories

4. “One drop of truth can outweigh an ocean of lies.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

5. “The less you speak, the more you will hear.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

6. “The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

7. “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, not between classes, nor between political parties, but through every human heart.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

8. “It’s an universal law – intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

9. “We didn’t love freedom enough.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

10. “To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

11. “Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Featured in: Country Quotes

12. “Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

13. “Even the most rational approach to ethics is defenseless if there isn’t the will to do what is right.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Featured in: Country Quotes

15. “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.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

16. “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

17. “Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

18. “You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power – he’s free again.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

19. “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.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

20. “Evil people always support each other; that is their chief strength.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

21. “A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Featured in: Being Happy Quotes

22. “In our age, when technology is gaining control over life, when material well-being is considered the most important goal, when the influence of religion has been weakened everywhere in the world, a special responsibility lies upon the writer.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

23. “Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

24. “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

25. “To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

26. “The generation now coming out of Western schools is unable to distinguish good from bad. Even those words are unacceptable. This results in impaired thinking ability.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

27. “Mistakes are a great educator when one is honest enough to admit them and willing to learn from them.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

28. “We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

29. “Education doesn’t make you smarter.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

30. “A great disaster had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

31. “Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

32. “If you wanted to put the world to rights, who should you begin with: yourself or others?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

34. “Nowadays we don’t think much of a man’s love for an animal; we laugh at people who are attached to cats. But if we stop loving animals, aren’t we bound to stop loving humans too?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

35. “Patriotism means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation, which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins, and penitence for them.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

36. “It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

37. “When you’re cold, don’t expect sympathy from someone who’s warm.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

38. “We always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

39. “Lord, give me the strength to accomplish what You’ve given me to do and the faith to trust You that what I haven’t been able to accomplish You’ve already assigned to someone else.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

40. “We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

41. “If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person’s mind begins to roam irretrievably. One’s fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

42. “Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

43. “A human being is all hope and impatience.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

44. “Work is what horses die of.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

45. “I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it – from The Gulag Archipelago.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

46. “The one who doesn’t pull his weight is not asked to pull, while the one who does, pulls for two.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

47. “No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

48. “Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

49. “Happiness doesn’t depend on the actual number of blessings we manage to scratch from life, only our attitude towards them...”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

50. “Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn