Top 300 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

102. “A strong man never loses his head in defeat or despondency.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

104. “Each person has his special moment of life when he unfolded himself to the fullest, felt to the deepest, and expressed himself to the utmost, to himself and to others.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

105. “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

106. “Art thaws even the frozen, darkened soul, opening it to lofty spiritual experience.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

107. “People who are at ease with their consciences always look happy.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

108. “And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

109. “The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

110. “If you live in a graveyard, you can’t weep for everyone.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

111. “How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand one who’s cold?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

112. “Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye.” But the proverb goes on to say: “Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

113. “The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

116. “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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

119. “Someone that you have deprived of everything is no longer in your power. He is once again entirely free.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

123. “There is a law of time, a law of oblivion: glory to the dead; life to the living.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

124. “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

125. “Prayers are like those appeals of ours. Either they don’t get through or they’re returned with ‘rejected’ scrawled across ’em.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

129. “What a force is laughter.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

135. “I am a frail vessel full of errors.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

136. “When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

138. “Mourn if you must, but don’t stop fighting.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

139. “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

140. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

141. “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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

148. “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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

150. “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