Top 300 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

152. “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

153. “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

154. “Why can’t you understand? The stars fall down now and then. The gaps have to be filled.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

156. “Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art-and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, oversimplified explanations.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

159. “The task of the artist is to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and the outrage of what man has done to it, and poignantly to let people know.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

160. “It is not our level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes lie within our power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

161. “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.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

162. “It is almost always impossible to evaluate at the time events which you have already experienced, and to understand their meaning with the guidance of their effects. All the more unpredictable and surprising to us will be the course of future events.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

163. “The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

165. “Religion itself cannot but be dynamic. In order to combat modern materialistic mores, to fight nihilism and egotism, religion must also develop, must be flexible in its forms, and it must have a correlation with the cultural forms of the epoch.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

166. “Human nature, if it changes at all, changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

167. “The clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

169. “Only the first swath cut by the scythe is difficult.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

170. “It is a brave man who is the first to sit down during a standing ovation.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

171. “Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

172. “It takes a fool to rush off to war!”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

173. “Economic growth is not only unncessary, but ruinous.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

174. “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

175. “It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

176. “A fish does not campaign against fisheries-it only tries to slip through the mesh.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

177. “Our envy of others devours us most of all.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

178. “When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

179. “To preserve his life, should a man pay everything that gives it color, scent and excitement?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

181. “Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

182. “It’s quite enough to show a well-beaten dog the whip.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

183. “Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

184. “One world, one mankind cannot exist in the face of six, four or even two scales of values: We shall be torn apart by this disparity of rhythm, this disparity of vibrations.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

185. “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.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

186. “Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes a person’s noblest impulses.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

187. “That which is called humanism, but what would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of our life.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

190. “People can live through hardship, but from hard feelings they perish.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

191. “We are all human, and our senses are quicker to prompt us than our reason. Every man gives off a scent, and that scent tells you how to act before your head does.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

192. “This is a grave danger: the stoppage of information between the parts of the planet. Contemporary science knows that such stoppage is the way of entropy, of universal destruction.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

193. “The most intense patriotism always flourishes in the rear.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

194. “If a person can build a fence around himself, he is bound to do it.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

195. “Call no day happy ’til it is done; call no man happy til he is dead.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

196. “There can be no acceptable future without an honest analysis of the past.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

198. “Once the fight is on-strike quickly and often.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

199. “If one is a professional soldier, it is part of one’s job to die sooner or later.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

200. “If we live in a state of constant fear, can we remain human?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn