West Quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

11 West quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

All West quotes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s page

For a quick look at Solzhenitsyn’s take on the West, these eleven lines serve as a focused entry point. They reveal his sharp eye and moral urgency, even in a modest collection.

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The "October Revolution" is a myth generated by the winners, the Bolsheviks, and swallowed whole by progressive circles in the West.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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When Russia started to regain some of its strength as an economy and as a state, the West's reaction - perhaps a…

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide process, with East and West yielding the same results, and once again…

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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The perception of the West as mostly a "knight of democracy" has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical…

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word 'modernity'…

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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The Communists have for decades loudly proclaimed their goal of destroying the bourgeois world, while the West merely smiled at what seemed…

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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This deliberately nurtured hatred then spreads to all that is alive, to life itself, to the world with its colors, sounds, and…

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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There also exists another alliance - at first glance a strange one, a surprising one - but if you think about it,…

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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If you wanted to put the world to rights, who should you begin with: yourself or others?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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“...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…

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press…

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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If there were no executioners, there would be no executions.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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It is almost always impossible to evaluate at the time events which you have already experienced, and to understand their meaning with the guidance…

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Human nature is full of riddles; . . . one of those riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by…

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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“It was astonishing that the pseudo wreckers, who knew perfectly well that they weren't wreckers, believed that military men and priests were being shaken…

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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When the whole discussion of "developing a national idea" hastily began in post-Soviet Russia, I tried to pour cold water on it with the…

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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“It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience;…

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes a person's noblest impulses.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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The same old caveman feeling-greed, envy, violence, and mutual hate, which along the way assumed respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial struggle, mass struggle,…

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Surrender one hair, and you'll end up beardless.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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