26 Quotes by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul.

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.

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.

The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. "One word of truth outweighs the world.

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.

It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that "past" which "ought not to be stirred up.

Then came the time for the evening visit to the toilet, for which, in all likelihood, you had waited, all atremble, all day. How relieved, how eased, the whole world suddenly became! How the great questions all simplified themselves at the same instant---did you feel it?

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

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century.