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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

1918–2008 Russia

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn [Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын] (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian philosopher, novelist, dramatist and historian. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, returning to Russia in 1994.

Russia
Academics
Historians
Nobel laureates
Novelists

Also known as: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alexanderr Solzhenitsyn, Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

Random Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quote

47 quotes

It is here that we see the dawn of hope: for no matter how formidably Communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what successes it attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity.

Templeton Address (1983)

The disappearance of whole nations would impoverish us no less than if all the people were to become identical, with the same character and the same face. Nations are the wealth of humanity, its generalized personalities. The least among them has its own special colors, and harbors within itself a special aspect of God's design.

Why does the (U.S.) State Department decide who should get Sevastopol?...

Interview With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the New Russia and Ukraine (1994)

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.

Harvard University address (1978)

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

The Gulag Archipelago (1973)

But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible 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 have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

Templeton Address (1983)

They are lying. We know they are lying. They know we know they are lying. Yet, they are still lying.

Misattributed

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.