582 Quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.

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

...you are strong only as long as you don't deprive people of everything. For a person you've taken everything from is no longer in your power. He's free all over again.

So in our own poor hides and from our miserable comrades we learn the nature of satiety. 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.

It's true that private enterprise is extremely flexible, But its only good within very narrow limits. If private enterprise isn't held in an iron grip it gives birth to people who are no better than beasts, those stock-exchange people with greedy appetites beyond restraint.

...it's only on a black day that you begin to have friends.

Work, he reckoned, was the best medicine of all.Work is what horses die of. Everybody should know that.

We wanted to recreate inside ourselves our former front-line self-assurance. We were pups and we did not understand to what extent the Archipelago was unlike the front, to what degree its war of siege was more difficult than our war of explosives.

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