Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes - Page 3

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• You're sincere, but in order not to upset your views you avoid talking with people who think differently. You pick your thoughts from conversations with people like yourself, from books written by people like yourself. In physics they call it resonance. You start out with modest opinions, but they match and build each other up to a scale.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Book, Thinking, Views

  Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1972). “The First Circle”

  108 Copy quote

• Surrender one hair, and you'll end up beardless.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Hair, Surrender, Ends

  15 Copy quote

• At what point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about one of them individually...and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Taken, Home, Together

  24 Copy quote

• Mistakes are a great educator when one is honest enough to admit them and willing to learn from them

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Mistake, Thought Provoking, Honest

  17 Copy quote

• During my time in the camps, I had got to know the enemies of the human race quite well: they respect the big fist and nothing else; the harder you slug them, the safer you will be.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Race, Enemy, Slugs

  30 Copy quote

• Education doesn't make you smarter.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Smarter

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1991). “Cancer Ward: A Novel”, p.31, Macmillan

  15 Copy quote

• Vladimir Putin inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people. And he started to do what was possible - a slow and gradual restoration. These efforts were not noticed, nor appreciated, immediately. In any case, one is hard pressed to find examples in history when steps by one country to restore its strength were met favorably by other governments.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Country, People, Effort

  30 Copy quote

• The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Running, Heart, Men

  36 Copy quote

• Let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Lying, Men, Support

  Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Anne Applebaum (2007). “The Gulag Archipelago Volume 2: An Experiment in Literary Investigation”, Harper Perennial Modern Classics

  58 Copy quote

• 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

  Russia, Europe, Usa

  Source: www.spiegel.de

  83 Copy quote

• There can be no acceptable future without an honest analysis of the past.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Past, Analysis, Honest

  15 Copy quote

• Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Funny, Truth, Add

  41 Copy quote

• Communism will never be halted by negotiations or through the machinations of detente. It can only be halted by force from without or by disintegration from within.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  War, Cold, Communism

  39 Copy quote

• Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Country, Travel, Memories

  128 Copy quote

• The same old caveman feeling-greed, envy, violence, and mutual hate, which along the way assumed respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial struggle, mass struggle, labor-union struggle-are tearing our world to pieces.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Hate, Struggle, Our World

  27 Copy quote

• Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Fashion, Book, College

  A World Split Apart, delivered 8 June 1978, Harvard University

  68 Copy quote

• The Communists have for decades loudly proclaimed their goal of destroying the bourgeois world, while the West merely smiled at what seemed to be an extravagant joke.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  War, Goal, World

  14 Copy quote

• On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Spiritual, Atheist, Real

  A World Split Apart, delivered 8 June 1978, Harvard University

  48 Copy quote

• Many of you have already found out, and others will find out in the course of their lives, that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate our attention totally on it's pursuit. But even while it eludes us, the illusion of knowing it still lingers and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Elude Us, Knowing, Attention

  A World Split Apart, delivered 8 June 1978, Harvard University

  24 Copy quote

• 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

  Health, Psychics, Disease

  A World Split Apart, delivered 8 June 1978, Harvard University

  86 Copy quote

• ... that maxim of Descartes: "Question everything!" Question everything!

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Doubt, Maxims

  13 Copy quote

• Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print," it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Memories, Freedom, Heart

  Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's Nobel lecture in literature delivered only to the Swedish Academy, www.nobelprize.org. 1970.

  22 Copy quote

• When you're cold, don't expect sympathy from someone who's warm.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Cold, Warm

  12 Copy quote

• If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person's mind begins to roam irretrievably. One's fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Mind, Harder, Persons

  9 Copy quote

• A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  May, Today, West

  A World Split Apart — Commencement Address Delivered At Harvard University, www.orthodoxytoday.org. June 8, 1978.

  12 Copy quote

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