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
To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good.
One world, one mankind cannot exist in the face of six, four or even two scales of values: We shall be torn apart by this disparity of rhythm, this disparity of vibrations.
Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.
Each person has his special moment of life when he unfolded himself to the fullest, felt to the deepest, and expressed himself to the utmost, to himself and to others.
That which is called humanism, but what would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of our life
The task of the artist is to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and the outrage of what man has done to it, and poignantly to let people know.
Only an extraordinary person can turn opportunity into reality.
Human nature, if it changes at all, changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth.
Nowadays we don't think much of a man's love for an animal; we laugh at people who are attached to cats. But if we stop loving animals, aren't we bound to stop loving humans too?
Economic growth is not only unncessary, but ruinous.
I dare hope that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history.
The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul.
A hard life improves the vision.
We particularly like people who value us highly.