Quotes About Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There always is this fallacious belief: "It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible." Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth. ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN1

There always is this fallacious belief: "It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible." Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth. ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

I was once on a BBC current-affairs show and the sneering host produced a Solzhenitsyn quote designed to demonstrate that my view of American pre-eminence was all hooey, and rounded it out with a snide "I take it you've heard of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?" "Oh, sure," I said. "We have the same piano tuner." Which we did.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great documenter of the slave-labour-camp horrors of the latter, once wrote that the "pitiful ideology" holding that "human beings are created for happiness" was an ideology "done in by the first blow of the work assigner's cudgel.

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.

The concept of maximum promotion of human rights to the expense of the majority of people in fact undermines the entire concept of the human community.

Communism will never be halted by negotiations or through the machinations of detente. It can only be halted by force from without or by disintegration from within.

one were seeking a symbolic moment when this transformation was accomplished, a hinge on which post-war Europe's self-understanding turned, it came in Paris on December 28th 1973 with the first Western publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. Reviewing the English translation in the Guardian, W. L. Webb wrote 'To live now and not to know this work is to be a kind of historical fool, missing a crucial part of the consciousness of the age.