Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

Nobody who's ever been to Gulag is a pacifist.

Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.

Unlike the Holocaust, Stalin's murders are forgotten: dust blowing in the wind.

Several million ordinary folk were killed and several hundred thousand starved to death; none of my acquaintances died of hunger.

We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.

No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz.

To me, Columbine is just as awful as Vietnam, and it's just as awful as anything else.

The much greater crimes of the Soviet Gulags occurred over decades and cost millions of lives.

We have lived through the flood time of fascism and of the nazism which ran its meteoric course at a cost to mankind in suffering and waste beyond all computation.

Words do not pay for my dead people.

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.

There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.

History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood.

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.

I was in New York City on 9/11. Grief remains from that awful day, but not only grief. There is fear, too, a fear informed by the knowledge that whatever my worst nightmare is, there is someone out there embittered enough to carry it out.

My mind revolts and my soul cannot support the weight of so much evil: theft, rape, pillage, deaths, and murders, fires and devastation; the virgin violated, the cry of the widow and the orphan; the father armed against his son and each one looking for his brother to kill him; of those who have migrated; of the thousands who have fled; of the bodies stretched out in the public streets; of the bones which cover the fields and of so much blood shed on Venezuela’s soil.

A more shocking scene cannot be imagined, than that witnessed by the party of men who went to the relief of the unfortunate emigrants in the California Mountains. The bones of those who had died and been devoured by the miserable ones that still survived were lying around their tents and cabins. Bodies of men, women and children, with half the flesh torn from them, lay on every side. A woman sat by the body of her husband, who had just died, eating out his tongue; the heart she had already taken out, broiled, and eat! The daughter was seen eating the flesh of the father - the mother that of her children - children that of father and mother. The emaciated, wild, and ghastly appearance of the survivors, added to the horror of the scene. Language cannot describe the awful change that a few weeks of dire suffering had wrought in the minds of these wretched and pitiable beings. Those who but one month before would have shuddered and sickened at the thought of eating human flesh, or of killing their companions and relatives to preserve their own lives, now looked upon the opportunity by these acts afforded them of escaping the most dreadful of deaths …

History is a bath of blood.

There will never be another Holocaust in the history of the Jewish people. Never again, never again!

No nation, no country has lived through such hardship and bloodshed as befell the Russian people.

A piece of each of us died.

I have come to believe there is nothing in the lives of human beings more terrifying than war and nothing more important than for those of us who have experienced it to share its awful truth

The guilt of Stalin and his immediate entourage before the Party and the people for the mass repressions and lawlessness they committed is enormous and unforgivable.