Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

“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.”

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

“Education doesn't make you smarter.”

“It's an 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.”

“Our envy of others devours us most of all.”

“The sole substitute for an experience we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.”

“To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail.”

“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.”

“A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy.”

“Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?”

“The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil.

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.”

“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?”

“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 thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

“It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.”

“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.”

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

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.”