Best Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes About Freedom, Truth, Communism, Socialism & Inspirational! Aleksandr Isayevich was a Russian writer who wrote under the pen name Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn, a well-known Soviet dissident, was an outspoken opponent of communism who contributed to raising awareness of political persecution in the USSR, particularly the Gulag system, around the world. He was born on December 11, 1918. Solzhenitsyn left his Christian beliefs when he was still a young man and eventually became an adherent of atheism and Marxism–Leninism. Because of his time in prison and the camps, he slowly became an Eastern Orthodox Christian interested in philosophy.

During World War II, Solzhenitsyn was working as a captain in the Red Army since he was caught by the SMERSH and condemned to eight years in the Gulag, after the internal exile, for criticizing the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a personal letter. Solzhenitsyn was able to regain his freedom and clear his name as a direct consequence of the Khrushchev Thaw. After recommitting himself to the Christian religion of his youth, he began writing books about the repressions he faced while living in the Soviet Union and his personal experiences.

In 1962, with the blessing of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, he released his debut book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which documented the repressions of Stalinism. He kept writing and publishing books, including Cancer Ward in 1966, In the First Circle in 1968, and The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, which upset the Soviet government when it came out.

He received the Nobel Prize in Writing in 1970 “for the ethical energy with which he has followed the important traditions of Russian literature. One of the most widely read books, “Gulag Archipelago, “probably amounts to a head-on challenge to the Soviet regime” and sold tens of millions of copies. On August 3, 2008, he passed away.

Best Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

1. “You must understand, the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
2. “The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. “One word of truth outweighs the world.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
3. “Modern society is hypnotized by socialism. It is prevented by socialism from seeing the mortal danger it is in. And one of the greatest dangers of all is that you have lost all sense of danger, you cannot even see where it’s coming from as it moves swiftly towards you.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
4. “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?” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
5. “To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
6. “If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.’” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
7. “The strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization. Neither a market economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement of human life. If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
8. “Evil people always support each other; that is their chief strength.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
9. “To do evil a human being must, first of all, believe that what he’s doing is good… Ideology – that is what gives devil doing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
10. “It’s a universal law– intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
11. “If only it were all so simple! 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?” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
12. “We hear a constant clamor for rights, rights, always rights, but so very little about responsibility. And we have forgotten God. The need now is for selflessness, for a spirit of sacrifice, for a willingness to put aside personal gains for the salvation of the whole Western world.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
13. “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
14. “I hope that no one present will suspect me of offering my personal criticism of the Western system to present socialism as an alternative. Having experienced applied socialism in a country where the alternative has been realized, I certainly will not speak for it. The well-known Soviet mathematician Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliant book under the title Socialism; it is a profound analysis showing that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
15. “We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others… When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers … we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
16. “In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers . . . we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
17. “In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers . . . we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
18. “The generation now coming out of Western schools is unable to distinguish good from bad. Even those words are unacceptable. This results in impaired thinking ability.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
19. “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage . Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
20. “Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
21. “The price of cowardice will only be evil. We shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
22. “If… if… We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! ……….. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
23. “Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as “we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology”. The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
24. “What is the most precious thing in the world? I see now that it is the knowledge that you have no part in injustice. Injustice is stronger than you, it always was and always will be, but let it not be done through you.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
25. “The task of the artist is to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and the outrage of what man has done to it, and poignantly to let people know.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quotes
26. “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.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
27. “If we look far into the future, one can see a time in the 21st century when both Europe and the USA will be in dire need of Russia as an ally.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
28. “I dare hope that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
29. “For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
30. “Happiness doesn’t depend on the actual number of blessings we manage to scratch from life, only our attitude towards them.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn