Quote

The one who pulls is the one they urge on.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Age: 89 †
Born: 1918
Born: December 11
Died: 2008
Died: January 1
Historian
Militant
Military Personnel
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Public Figure
School Teacher
Screenwriter
Writer
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Pulls
Urge
Urges
Willingness

More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Image
The generation now coming out of Western schools is unable to distinguish good from bad. Even those words are unacceptable. This results in impaired thinking ability.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
Who will dare say he has defined art?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
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?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for-all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
In every life there is one particular event that is decisive for the entire person-for his fate, his convictions, his passions.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
Was it Gorky who had said, If your children are no better than you are, you have fathered them in vain, indeed you have lived in vain.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
European democracy was originally imbued with a sense of Christian responsibility and self-discipline, but these spiritual principles have been gradually losing their force. Spiritual independence is being pressured on all sides by the dictatorship of self-satisfied vulgarity, of the latest fads, and of group interests.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
A great number of publications and movies on the history of the 20th century - albeit of uneven quality - are evidence of a growing demand. Quite recently, the state-owned TV channel 'Russia' aired a series based on Varlam Shalamov's works, showing the terrible, cruel truth about Stalin's camps. It was not watered down.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day. There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail. Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days. The three extra days were for leap years.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
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 objection that, after all the devastating losses we had experienced, it would be quite sufficient to have just one task: the preservation of a dying people.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
In our age, when technology is gaining control over life, when material well-being is considered the most important goal, when the influence of religion has been weakened everywhere in the world, a special responsibility lies upon the writer.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
Beat a dog once and you only have to show him the whip.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
A great disaster had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God that's why all this has happened.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Image
A leader should not be a man who arbitrarily imported his own ideas but the essential focal point for a group of people who trusted one another and worked for a common aim.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn