Enhance Your Quote Experience
Enjoy ad-free browsing, unlimited collections, and advanced search features with Premium.
“ ”It is a human characteristic, which has been richly exploited in every era, that while hope of survival is still alive in a man, while he still believes his troubles will have a favorable outcome, and while he still has the chance to unmask treason or to save someone else by sacrificing himself, he continues to cling to the pitiful remnants of comfort and remains silent and submissive. When he has been taken and destroyed, when he has nothing more to lose, and is, in consequence, ready and eager for heroic action, his belated rage can only spend itself against the stone walls of solitary confinement. Or the breath of the death sentence makes him indifferent to earthly affairs.
About Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn [Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын] (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian philosopher, novelist, dramatist and historian. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, returning to Russia in 1994.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Additional quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
He ate his supper without bread. A double helping <i>and</i> bread — that was going too far. The bread would do for tomorrow. The belly is a demon. It doesn't remember how well you treated it yesterday; it'll cry out for more tomorrow.
If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. 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.
He’s retired, he’s just turned sixty, you know. And on the actual day of his retirement it turned out he wasn’t a radiologist at heart at all, he didn’t want to spend another day of his life on medicine. He’d always wanted to be a beekeeper, and now bees are the only thing he’ll take an interest in. How do these things happen, do you think? If you’re really a beekeeper, how is it that you waste the best years of your life doing something else?