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
... but it is human to be outraged by injustice, even to the point of courting destruction!
... mutual lack of understanding carries the threat of imminent and violent destruction.
Any fool can bomb a train, but just try sorting out the mess.
A whole week, a single campaign, a month, a week, even a day was far more than enough to cut a company or platoon to ribbons or cripple a man for life: it needed only a quarter of an hour.
... any country that is not careful can be seized.
... once you get up steam, you are carried helplessly along.
The intellectual is not defined by professional group and type of occupation. Nor are good upbringing and a good family enough in themselves to produce an intellectual. An intellectual is a person whose interest in and preoccupation with the spiritual side of life are insistent and constant and not forced by external circumstances, even flying in the face of them. An intellectual is a person whose thought is nonimitative.
Cracks make caves collapse.
... that maxim of Descartes: "Question everything!" Question everything!
If so far we have been unable to see clearly or to reflect the eternal lineaments of truth, is it not because we too are still moving towards some end-because we are still alive?
If there were no executioners, there would be no executions.
In all probability an outburst of desperation in the midst of general submissiveness will always help.
When things are too clear, they are no longer interesting.
We are so attached to the earth, and yet we are incapable of holding onto it.