Top 300 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

202. “In all probability an outburst of desperation in the midst of general submissiveness will always help.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

203. “Voting for impersonal parties and their programmes is a false substitute for the only true way to elect people’s representatives: voting by an actual person for an actual candidate.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

204. “For a country to have a great writer is to have another government.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

205. “Violence does not and cannot flourish by itself; it is inevitably intertwined with lying.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

206. “I have grown used to the fact that public repentance is the most unacceptable option for the modern politician.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

207. “We are so attached to the earth, and yet we are incapable of holding onto it.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

208. “I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

210. “Still, everybody wants to eat.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

211. “The central government possesses no plan of finding the way out of this blind alley.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

212. “Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one’s well-being.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

213. “Oh, how hard it is to part with power! This one has to understand.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

214. “Anything too far out of tune with our attitude is lost, either in the ears themselves or somewhere beyond, but it is lost.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

215. “Not death itself, but only the moral preparation for it, holds terrors.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

216. “Cracks make caves collapse.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

217. “I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

218. “Not all of me shall die.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

219. “If we could all take a sober look at our history, then we would no longer see this nostalgic attitude to the Soviet past that predominates among the less affected part of our society.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

220. “Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

221. “The essence of life will never be captured by even the greatest of formulas.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

222. “Even the most broad-minded of us can embrace only that part of truth into which our own snout has blundered.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

223. “A hard life improves the vision.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

224. “Justness exists, even if few people exist who feel it.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

225. “Too much art was no art at all. Like candy instead of bread!”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

226. “The foundation stones of a great building are destined to groan and be pressed upon; it is not for them to crown the edifice.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

227. “I was always optimistic. And I held to and was guided by my views.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

228. “Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

229. “Every act of perception has an emotional coloring.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

230. “We particularly like people who value us highly.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

231. “First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

232. “When things are too clear, they are no longer interesting.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

233. “I have always had that inner drive, since my birth. And I have always devoted myself gladly to work – to work and to the struggle.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

234. “When we feel that we are not sufficiently respected, we should ask ourselves whether we are living as we should.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

235. “There is no point asserting and reasserting what the heart cannot believe.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

236. “My friends! Let us try to be helpful, if we are worth anything.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

237. “Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

238. “Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word ‘modernity’ if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

239. “If so far we have been unable to see clearly or to reflect the eternal lineaments of truth, is it not because we too are still moving towards some end-because we are still alive?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

240. “A whole week, a single campaign, a month, a week, even a day was far more than enough to cut a company or platoon to ribbons or cripple a man for life: it needed only a quarter of an hour.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

241. “As for Europe, its claims towards Russia are fairly transparently based on fears about energy, unjustified fears at that.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

242. “When you’re young, you haven’t the experience, when you’re old you haven’t the strength.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

243. “The earlier, the more fun. Why put it off? It’s the atomic age!”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

244. “Only a magician can fix a head on a body, but any fool can lop it off.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

245. “I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

246. “If it goes well with you, then all is well.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

247. “Let all of us who shared the prison soup meet again in better times!”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

248. “Good or evil-you cannot build your life apart from this distinction.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

249. “Which of us can control his feelings?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

250. “Of course, my views developed in the course of time. But I have always believed in what I did and never acted against my conscience.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn