Top 300 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “If you live in a graveyard, you can’t weep for everyone.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

102. “It’s not the sea that drowns you-it’s the puddle.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

103. “The price of cowardice will only be evil. We shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

104. “You should rejoice that you’re in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

105. “Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

106. “Why should I trust you? We haven’t drunk from the same bowl of soup.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

107. “The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

108. “A forest doesn’t weep over one tree.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

109. “Every human act can be disguised with a coating of gilt.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

110. “Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

111. “A genius doesn’t adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant’s taste.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

112. “Nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

113. “The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

114. “Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

115. “The thoughts of a prisoner – they’re not free either. They keep returning to the same things.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

116. “The name of ‘reform’ simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

118. “The revolution is an amalgam of former Party functionaries, quasi- democrats, KGB officers, and black-market wheeler-dealers, who are standing in power now and have represented a dirty hybrid unseen in world history.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

119. “The same old caveman feeling-greed, envy, violence, and mutual hate, which along the way assumed respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial struggle, mass struggle, labor-union struggle-are tearing our world to pieces.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

120. “It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

121. “What a force is laughter.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

122. “There is eternal simplicity to a solution once it has been discovered!”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

123. “As the fathers live, so the children play.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

124. “It was wrong to be too pragmatic, to judge people solely by results; it was more humane to judge by intentions.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

125. “Let us put it generally: if a regime is immoral, its subjects are free from all obligations to it.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

126. “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.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

127. “On our crowded planet there are no longer any internal affairs!”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

128. “We have to condemn the very idea that some people have the right to repress others.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

129. “We will die, but art will remain.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

130. “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.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

131. “A man used to riding in a car cannot understand a pedestrian.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

132. “One man who stopped lying could bring down a tyranny.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

133. “For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

134. “There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

135. “The Communists have for decades loudly proclaimed their goal of destroying the bourgeois world, while the West merely smiled at what seemed to be an extravagant joke.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

136. “All classifications in this world lack sharp boundaries, and all transitions are gradual.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

137. “But nothing is all black in nature.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

138. “The secret is that when you’ve been pitched head first into hell you just write about it.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

139. “The task must be to banish from mankind’s thought the idea that anybody has the right to use force against righteousness, against justice, against mutual agreements.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

140. “We should clearly understand that only the voluntary and conscientious acceptance by a people of its guilt can ensure the healing of a nation. Unremitting reproaches from outside are counterproductive.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

142. “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, races or creeds, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

143. “Let us not forget that violence does not and cannot exist by itself; it is invariably intertwined with the lie. They are linked in the most intimate, most organic and profound fashion: violence cannot conceal itself behind anything except lies, and lies have nothing to maintain them save violence. Anyone who has once proclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose the lie as his principle.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

144. “Freedom begins with respect for others’ rights.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

145. “Beat a dog once and you only have to show him the whip.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

146. “A drop in the ocean has no fear of a hurricane.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

147. “To taste the sea all one needs is one gulp.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

148. “Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

149. “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.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

150. “What is the most precious thing in the world? I see now that it is the knowledge that you have no part in injustice. Injustice is stronger than you, it always was and always will be, but let it not be done through you.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn