63 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes On Success In Life

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer, and a political prisoner. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of human rights abuses, the Gulag concentration camp system, and political repression in the Soviet Union. These Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quotes will motivate you.

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. “… that maxim of Descartes: “Question everything!” Question everything!” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

18. “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
19. “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
20. “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

21. “Education doesn’t make you smarter.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

22. “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
23. “The price of cowardice will only be evil. We shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
24. “If you want to change the world, who do you begin with, yourself or others? I believe if we begin with ourselves and do the things that we need to do and become the best person we can be, we have a much better chance of changing the world for the better.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

25. “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

26. “European democracy was originally imbued with a sense of Christian responsibility and self-discipline, but these spiritual principles have been gradually losing their force. Spiritual independence is being pressured on all sides by the dictatorship of self-satisfied vulgarity, of the latest fads, and of group interests.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
27. “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
28. “There can be no acceptable future without an honest analysis of the past.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
29. “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

30. “Our envy of others devours us most of all.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

31. “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
32. “Mistakes are a great educator when one is honest enough to admit them and willing to learn from them” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
33. “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
34. “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

35. “The less you speak, the more you will hear.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

36. “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
37. “A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
38. “Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination… Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

39. “A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

40. “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
41. “Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
42. “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

43. “… people don’t know what they are striving for. They waste themselves in senseless thrashing around for the sake of a handful of goods and die without realizing their spiritual wealth.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

44. “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
45. “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
46. “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 its 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
47. “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
48. “Freedom! To fill people’s mailboxes, eyes, ears, and brains with commercial rubbish against their will, television programs that are impossible to watch with a sense of coherence. Freedom! To force information on people, taking no account of their right not to accept it or their right of peace of mind. Freedom! To spit in the eyes and souls of passersby with advertisements.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

49. “Someone that you have deprived of everything is no longer in your power. He is once again entirely free.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

50. “And keep as few things as possible, so that you don’t have to fear for them. Give them up without a struggle-because otherwise, the humiliation will poison your heart. They will take them away from you in a fight, and trying to hold onto your property will only leave you with a bloodied mouth … But by owning things and trembling about their fate aren’t you forfeiting the rare opportunity of observing and understanding?” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
51. “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
52. “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

53. “It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

54. “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
55. “For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
56. “Happiness doesn’t depend on the actual number of blessings we manage to scratch from life, only our attitude towards them.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

57. “Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

58. “Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide process, with East and West yielding the same results, and once again for the same reason: Men have forgotten God.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
59. “It is a brave man who is the first to sit down during a standing ovation.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
60. “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.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
61. “I had grown up among engineers, and I could remember the engineers of the twenties very well indeed: their open, shining intellects, their free and gentle humor, their agility and breadth of thought, the ease with which they shifted from one engineering field to another, and, for that matter, from technology to social concerns and art. Then, too, they personified good manners and delicacy of taste; well-bred speech that flowed evenly and was free of uncultured words; one of them might play a musical instrument, another dabble in painting, and their faces always bore a spiritual imprint.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

62. “Was it Gorky who had said, “If your children are no better than you are, you have fathered them in vain, indeed you have lived in vain”.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

63. “It makes me happier, more secure, to think that I do not have to plan and manage everything for myself, that I am only a sword made sharp to smite the unclean forces, an enchanted sword to cleave and disperse them. Grant, O Lord, that I may not break as I strike! Let me not fall from Thy hand!” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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