63 Quotes by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Someone that you have deprived of everything is no longer in your power. He is once again entirely free.

It's all so arty there's no art left in it.

I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it - from The Gulag Archipelago

But why wake up all that past? Why reopen the old wounds of those who were living in Moscow and in country houses at the time, writing for the newspapers, speaking from rostrums, going off to resorts and abroad? Why recall all that when it is still the same even today? After all, you can only write about whatever “will not be repeated.

In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars.

And we, from the whole of our life experience there, have concluded that there is only one way to withstand violence: with firmness.

Violence does not necessarily take people by the throat and strangle them. Usually it demands no more than an ultimate allegiance from its subjects. They are required merely to become accomplices in its lies.

He leaned sideways, tipping the chair over, and swung there, reciting:"The hurricane swept by, few of us survived, and many failed to answer friendship's roll call...

Writers haven't got any rockets to blast off. We don't even trundle the most insignificant auxiliary vehicle. We haven't got any military might. So what can literature do in the face of the merciless onslaught of open violence? One word of truth outweighs the whole world.