Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (born 11 December 1918) Russian author

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Truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.
- Source: Commencement address at Harvard University , June 8, 1978

A loss of courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days...
- Source: Commencement address at Harvard University , June 8, 1978

Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.
- Source: Commencement address at Harvard University , June 8, 1978

This is surely the main problem of the twentieth century: is it permissible merely to carry out orders and commit one's conscience to someone else's keeping? Can a man do without ideas of his own about good and evil, and merely derive them from the printed instructions and verbal orders of his superioers? Oaths! Those solemn pledges pronounced with a tremor in the voice and intended to defend the people against evildoers: see how easily they can be misdirected to the service of evildoers and against the people!
- Source: The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 3, 'The Kids with Tommy Guns'

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.
- Source: The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1

Governments were never moral beings.
- Source: The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1

Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?
- Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Ivanov came to quite the same conclusion, though life supplied him with quite different material to think about. He puts it like this: many lives have a mystical sense, but not everyone reads it right; more often than not it is given to us in cryptic form, and when we fail to decipher it we despair because our lives seem meaningless… the secret of a great life is often a man’s success in deciphering the mysterious symbols vouchsafed to him, understanding them, and so learning to walk in the true path.
- Source: The Oak and the Calf

Call no day happy til it is done; call no man happy til he is dead.
- Source: The Oak and the Calf

At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church--none of them has been able to stop it. And don't succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state's essential functions. ... War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from evil. In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses--but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction--and that is war.
- Source: "Father Severyan", in November 1916

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A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.

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

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction.

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.

For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

For years, I have with a reluctant heart withheld from publication this already completed book: my obligation to those still living outweighed my obligation to the dead. But now that State Security has seized the book anyway, I have no alternative but to publish it immediately. -- on The Gulag Archipelago

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

History has in different questions laid out some tremendous turnabouts and curves.

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.

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.

I have not painted the dark reality in rose-tinted shades but I do include a clear way, a search for something brighter, some way out - most importantly in the spiritual sense.

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.

I was in a state of witless shock, as though flames had suddenly enwrapped and paralyzed me so that for a moment I had no mind, no memory.

If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.

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

Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.

On our crowded planet there are no longer any internal affairs!

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

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.

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.

Russians are exiting from communism in a most unfortunate and awkward way.

Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask; by whom has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?

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.

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

The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us... than the need for any external expansion of our power.

The name of "reform" simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.

The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.

There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.

This book is an agglomeration of lean-tos and annexes and there is no knowing how big the next addition will be, or where it will be put. At any point, I can call the book finished or unfinished.

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.

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

You only have power over people so 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.