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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

Total quotes: 47
“A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: Genius, tyranny
“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Power, Cruelty, Totalitarian, Statism, Communism
“Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Quote Unquote(A Handbook of Quotations)
Tagged: Talent, sharing
“In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the state.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Prime Movers
Tagged: Lies, Totalitarian, Statism
“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Prison, Soul, Suffering
“The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: Hunger, Gratitude
“Be glad you're in prison.  Here you have time to think about your soul.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: Soul, Prison
“Where I come from, they used to say God breaks up the old moon to make stars.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: God, Moon, Stars
“Because, Alyoshka, prayers are like petitions —either they don't get through at all, or else it's 'complaint rejected.'”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: Bureaucracy, prayer
“When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Conspiracy of Credit
Tagged: Truth, Envy
“Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the process loses his soul.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Small Is Still Beautiful
Tagged: Soul
“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Lies, Individual, Courage
“Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Cowardice, Sacrifice
“Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: Socialism
“Listen to me, he said, do you really think women are the flower of life? You know, you can get fed up with them after a while … All they do is stop you achieving anything serious.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
Tagged: Misogyny
“Communism is as crude an attempt to explain society and the individual as if a surgeon were to perform his delicate operations with a meat ax.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Tagged: Communism
“All Communist Parties, upon attaining power, have become completely merciless. But at the stage before they achieve power, it is necessary to use disguises.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West
Tagged: Communism, Marx
“You don't need brains to carry a handbarrow.  That's why the foreman had put these ex-bosses on the job.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: Work, Authoritarian Regimes
“It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: justification
“Human nature, if it changes at all, changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Human Nature
“History sometimes does know revenge, a sort of voluptuous and delayed justice, but chooses strange forms for it and unexpected executors of its will.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Justice, Revenge
“Surely people should eventually cease to be surprised at anything? And yet they continue to be.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
“Thanks to ideology the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing calculated on a scale in the millions.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Ideologies, Democide, Evil
“You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power—he's free again.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
Tagged: Power, Freedom
“Literature becomes the living memory of a nation…woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russia, Ukraine and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
Tagged: Literature, Censorship, Totalitarianism
“For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: Communism, Russia
“Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle
Tagged: King Midas, Stalin, Communism
“There are two ends to a stick, and there's more than one way of working.  If it's for a human being—make sure and do it properly.  If it's for the big man—just make it look good.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: Work, Bosses
“Life isn't so bad here.  All right—it's a special camp.  But why does wearing numbers bother you?  They weigh nothing, number patches.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: Prison
“One word of truth outweighs the whole world.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture
Tagged: Truth
“One look at the whip is enough for a beaten dog!”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: punishment, Discipline
“A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Submission
“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, Cancer Ward
Tagged: Gender war
“If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle
Tagged: Totalitarianism, Caution, Human Condition
“Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: Compassion
“Yes, but art isn't what you do, it's how you do it.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: Art, Artistic Process
“Work, he reckoned, was the best medicine of all.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tagged: Work, Medicine
“Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Evil, Religion
“To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Truth, Bravery, Prison
“Here is a riddle not for us contemporaries to figure out: Why is Germany allowed to punish its evildoers and Russia is not? What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us if we do not have the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside our body? What, then, can Russia teach the world?”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Tagged: Nazi Germany, Communist Atrocities, Russia
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