Top 300 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “We have ourselves to save.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

252. “But what can you say in a letter?”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— 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. “If someone asked you, why not help him out?”

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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

267. “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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

270. “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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

272. “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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

275. “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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

284. “The harder life is for a man when he is young, the easier it will be in the future.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

285. “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

286. “L. Kopelev came back to Moscow in 1955 and made a discovery: ‘I am I’ll-at-ease with successful people! I keep up acquaintance only with those of my friends who are in some way unlucky.’ But, then, only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

287. “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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

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

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

296. “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

297. “But now, as he paced up and down the ward, he remembered how the old folk used to die back home on the Kama – Russians, Tartars, Votyaks or whatever they were. They didn’t puff themselves up or fight against it or brag that they weren’t going to die – they took death calmly. They didn’t stall squaring things away, they prepared themselves quietly and in good time, deciding who should have the mare, who the foal, who the coat and who the boots.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

298. “I have absorbed into myself my own eleven years there not as something shameful nor as a nightmare to be cursed: I have come almost to love that monstrous world, and now, by a happy turn of events, I have also been entrusted with many recent reports and letters. So perhaps I shall be able to give some account of the bones and flesh of that salamander – which, incidentally, is still alive.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

299. “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

300. “Why is it that all the main work of breaking down human souls went on at night? Why, from their very earliest years, did the Organs select the night? Because at night, the prisoner torn from sleep, even though he has not yet been tortured by sleeplessness, lacks his normal daytime equanimity and common sense. He is more vulnerable.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn