Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Men Quotations

Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad.

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.

To preserve his life, should a man pay everything that gives it color, scent and excitement?

It's quite enough to show a well-beaten dog the whip.

How quickly a zek (a prisoner) gets cheeky-or, putting it in literary language, how quickly a man's requirements grow.

... a man can safely sacrifice a great deal as long as he clings to the essential.

It is a brave man who is the first to sit down during a standing ovation.

A leader should not be a man who arbitrarily imported his own ideas but the essential focal point for a group of people who trusted one another and worked for a common aim.

After all, man is a complicated being, why should he be explainable by logic?

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.

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.

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.

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.

What is an optimist? The man who says, "It's worse everywhere else. We're better off than the rest of the world. We've been lucky." He is happy with things as they are and he doesn't torment himself. What is a pessimist? The man who says, "Things are fine everywhere but here. Everyone else is better off than we are. We're the only ones who've had a bad break." He torments himself continually.

Patriotism means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation, which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins, and penitence for them.

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.'

The task must be to banish from mankind's thought the idea that anybody has the right to use force against righteousness, against justice, against mutual agreements.

Let us drive away those cruel, greedy oppressors, governments, and the new ones, having just laid aside grenades and rifles, will be just and understanding. Far from it.

A strong man never loses his head in defeat or despondency.

A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country

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

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

Call no day happy 'til it is done; call no man happy til he is dead.

For a country to have a great writer is to have another government.

A man used to riding in a car cannot understand a pedestrian.

... We brush aside all scales not our own, as if they were follies or delusions.

A whole week, a single campaign, a month, a week, even a day was far more than enough to cut a company or platoon to ribbons or cripple a man for life: it needed only a quarter of an hour.

Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.

...skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

Each person has his special moment of life when he unfolded himself to the fullest, felt to the deepest, and expressed himself to the utmost, to himself and to others.

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.

Nowadays we don't think much of a man's love for an animal; we laugh at people who are attached to cats. But if we stop loving animals, aren't we bound to stop loving humans too?

Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.

It was wrong to be too pragmatic, to judge people solely by results; it was more humane to judge by intentions.

... direct [people] towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.

Like a bicycle, like a wheel that, once rolling, is stable only so long as it keeps moving but falls when its momentum stops, so the game between a man and woman, once begun, can exist only so long as it progresses. If the forward movement today is no more than it was yesterday, the game is over.

We are all human, and our senses are quicker to prompt us than our reason. Every man gives off a scent, and that scent tells you how to act before your head does.

How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold?

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

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.

Freedom or prison--what's the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.

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

A great disaster had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.

If I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire 20th century... I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.

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.

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.

Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same with happiness, the very same...happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. There's a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: 'Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied.

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