Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, historian, and short story writer. He was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and its totalitarianism and helped to raise global awareness of its Gulag forced labor camp system. He was allowed to publish only one work in the Soviet Union, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in the periodical Novy Mir. After this he had to publish in the West, most notably Cancer Ward, August 1914, and The Gulag...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth11 December 1918
CityKislovodsk, Russia
CountryRussian Federation
I would rather have the United States as the world's policeman than the Soviet Union as the world's jailer.
The Communists have for decades loudly proclaimed their goal of destroying the bourgeois world, while the West merely smiled at what seemed to be an extravagant joke.
Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society . . . loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.
One drop of truth can outweigh an ocean of lies
The one who pulls is the one they urge on.
If someone asked you, why not help him out?
You get no thanks from your belly-it always forgets what you've just done for it and comes begging again the next day.
Still, everybody wants to eat.
... human beings are better and lazier than their rules and instructions ...
No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death.
History is too slow for our life, for our hearts.
... but food eaten quickly isn't food.
Even the most broad-minded of us can embrace only that part of truth into which our own snout has blundered.
As the fathers live, so the children play.