Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

It's nice to know there are some things in early 21st-century post-industrial culture that don't change very fast. I am one of those.

I don't think human beings have changed in 2,000 years.

People say history is boring, and that is true because people are boring. We haven't changed since time began. We're still the same.

Man is man because he chanced to develop intelligence instead of instinct; otherwise he would to this day have remained among the anthropoid apes. He has turned away from nature, become unnatural, as it were, disliked the earth upon which he found himself, and changed the face of it somewhat to his liking.

The world is always childish, and with each new gewgaw of a revolution or new constitution that it finds, thinks it shall never cry any more.

They say I'm old-fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast!

Often on earth the gentlest heart is fain To feed and banquet on another's woe.

How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.

Time comes to us softly, slowly. It sits beside us for a while. Then, long before we are ready, it moves on.

This civilization is rapidly passing away, however. Let us rejoice or else lament the fact as much as everyone of us likes; but do not let us shut our eyes to it.

Contrary to what you believe, the earth does not revolve around the desires of your crotch.

Any given thing on the face of the earth could reveal the history of all things

A civilization is born Stoic and dies Epicurean.

We humans are destined to live with our feet on the earth and our heads in the heavens, and we can never be at peace because we are pulled both ways.

Some changes are so slow, you don't notice them, others are so fast, they don't notice you.

Our kinship with Earth must be maintained; otherwise, we will find ourselves trapped in the center of our own paved-over souls with no way out.

It used to be said that by a certain age a man had the face that he deserved. Nowadays, he has the face he can afford.

Difference between savage and civilized man: one is painted, the other gilded.

Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.

The civilized man is a larger mind but a more imperfect nature than the savage.

Should an anthropologist or a sociologist be looking for a bizarre society to study, I would suggest he come to Ulster. It is one of Europe's oddest countries. Here, in the middle of the twentieth century, with modern technology transforming everybody's lives, you find a medieval mentality that is being dragged painfully into the eighteenth century by some forward-looking people.

Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.

We cannot make a heaven on earth, though we may make a hell.

That religion and that nation will be blotted out of the face of the earth which pins its faith on injustice, untruth or violence.

Shankara commented on Krishna, on the Upanishads, on the Brahma Sutras. Ramanuja commented on the ancient enlightened people, Vallabha did the same. It has always been so in the East, because much dust gathers as time passes. Now, the Upanishads were written in a totally different world. That man has disappeared, that mind has disappeared, that world no more exists.