Top 300 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Freedom begins with respect for others’ rights.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

153. “Can a man who’s warm understand one who’s freezing?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

154. “That wasn’t like spying. Any fool can spy. A spy has a clean, exciting life. But try and spend ten years in a hard labour camp!”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

155. “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

156. “The man from whom you’ve taken everything is no longer in your power; he is free again.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

160. “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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

174. “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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

185. “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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

188. “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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

190. “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

191. “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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn