Top 300 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “If someone asked you, why not help him out?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

252. “There are defendants whom the judges are afraid of.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

254. “I leaf through the ancient philosophers and find my newest discoveries there.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

255. “In military science there is a principle more important than “Forward”: it is that the task should be proportionate to the means.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

256. “It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

257. “I cannot suggest political ways out, that is the task of politicians, so it is simply that those who accuse me of this do not know how to read.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

258. “Surely people should eventually cease to be surprised at anything? And yet they continue to be.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

259. “When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

260. “A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

261. “History is too slow for our life, for our hearts.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

262. “One should not ascribe the evil deeds of individual leaders or political regimes to an innate fault of the Russian people and their country.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

263. “The heart senses who is friend and who is no friend.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

264. “We never know beforehand how new posts or new work will change us.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

265. “Generosity is a two-edged virtue for an artist – it nourishes his imagination but has a fatal effect on his routine.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

266. “If there were no executioners, there would be no executions.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

267. “He who knows how to be content will be content with little.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

268. “The one who pulls is the one they urge on.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

269. “After all, man is a complicated being, why should he be explainable by logic?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

270. “Let us drive away those cruel, greedy oppressors, governments, and the new ones, having just laid aside grenades and rifles, will be just and understanding. Far from it.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

271. “I think the gap between rich and poor is an extremely dangerous phenomenon and needs the immediate attention of the state.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

272. “I am deeply convinced that God is present both in the lives of every person and also in the lives of entire nations.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

273. “Who will dare say he has defined art?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

274. “When Russia started to regain some of its strength as an economy and as a state, the West’s reaction – perhaps a subconscious one, based on erstwhile fears – was panic.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

275. “Truth, it seems, is always bashful, easily reduced to silence by the too blatant encroachment of falsehood.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

276. “A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

277. “By dying young, a man stays young forever in people’s memory. If he burns brightly before he dies, his light shines for all time. In his musings during the past few weeks Vadim had discovered an important and at first glance paradoxical point: a man of talent can understand and accept death more easily than a man with none – yet the former has more to lose. A man of no talent craves long life, yet Epicurus had once observed that a fool, if offered eternity, would not know what to do with it.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

278. “We like to take our anger out on those who are weaker, those who cannot answer. It is a human trait. And somehow the arguments to prove we are right appear out of nowhere.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

279. “No, the old proverb does not lie: Look for the brave in prison, and the stupid among the political leaders!”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

280. “Spy mania was one of the fundamental aspects of Stalin’s insanity.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

281. “Derzhavin discovered that the Jewish schnapps distillers were exploiting the alcoholism of the peasants: “After I had discovered that the Jews while seeking profits, use the lure of drink to beguile grain from the peasants, convert it into brandy and thereby cause a famine, I commanded that they should close their distilleries in the village of Liosno.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

282. “But what depths of enforced ignorance were achieved by the monstrous lies of the state. Even the most broad-minded of us can embrace only that part of the truth into which our own snout has blundered.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

283. “Erano queste le nostre camere della morte. Ci mancava il gas per fare le camere a gas.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

284. “And even in the fever of epidemic arrests, when people leaving for work said farewell to their families every day, because they could not be certain they would return at night, even then almost no one tried to run away and only in rare cases did people commit suicide. And that was exactly what was required. A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

285. “In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

286. “Like a bicycle, like a wheel that, once rolling, is stable only so long as it keeps moving but falls when its momentum stops, so the game between a man and woman, once begun, can exist only so long as it progresses. If the forward movement today is no more than it was yesterday, the game is over.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

287. “Does it bother you to wear a number? They don’t weigh anything, those numbers.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

288. “We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

289. “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

290. “He’s retired, he’s just turned sixty, you know. And on the actual day of his retirement it turned out he wasn’t a radiologist at heart at all, he didn’t want to spend another day of his life on medicine. He’d always wanted to be a beekeeper, and now bees are the only thing he’ll take an interest in. How do these things happen, do you think? If you’re really a beekeeper, how is it that you waste the best years of your life doing something else?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

291. “In general, “we draw no distinction between intention and the crime itself, and this is an instance of the superiority of Soviet legislation to bourgeois legislation.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

292. “All history is one continuous pestilence. There is no truth and there is no illusion. There is nowhere to appeal and nowhere to go.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

293. “So the steel chain forged with such reptilian cunning snapped at the link that had been fashioned from a woman’s heart.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

294. “Easy money had no weight: you didn’t feel you’d earned it. What you get for a song you won’t have for long, the old folks used to say, and they were right.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

295. “Moscow was an enormous city, but there was nowhere to go in it.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

296. “Now for the first time you were about to see people who were not your enemies. Now for the first time you were about to see others who were alive, who were traveling your road, and whom you could join to yourself with the joyous word “we.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

297. “He could barely stand, the Captain, but he kept on going. Shukhov had an old horse like that at home once. He took good care of that old horse, but he worked himself to death. And then they skinned the hide off him.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

298. “When our life crackles and sparks like a torch, we curse the necessity of spending eight hours uselessly in sleep. When we have been deprived of everything, when we have been deprived of hope, then bless you, fourteen hours of sleep!”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

299. “You’re a member of the collective! You’re a member of the collective!’ That’s right. But only while he’s alive. When the time comes for him to die, we release him from the collective. He may be a member, but he has to die alone. It’s only he who is saddled with the tumor, not the whole collective.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

300. “Given that interrogations had ceased to be an attempt to get at the truth, for the interrogators in difficult cases they became a mere exercise of their duties as executioners and in easy cases simply a pastime and a basis for receiving a salary.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn