Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

History dictates that unresponsive governments force ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

It is right to rebel against reactionaries.

Civil disobedience is the core of American defiance against kings and emperors.

Persecution matures young rebels.

People have a right to violence, to rebel, to fight back.

Dissidents can't be dissidents forever; we are dissidents because we don't want to be dissidents.

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, you can't take part. And you've got to put your body upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.

Organizations don’t make revolutions. People do.

It is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.

There is no way a spirit of resistance that has sunk so deep in the population can be repressed.

We might not be back. I might be in jail. I might be anywhere. But when I leave, you'll remember I said, with the last words on my lips, that I am a revolutionary. And you're going to have to keep on saying that. You're going to have to say that I am a proletariat; I am the people.

The absolute key issue is: how do you create enough political pressure? It's up to us to create that political will and there are tried and tested techniques for doing that. So we're talking about the need for civil disobedience that escalates into a rebellion and uprising.

A little rebellion is a good thing.

In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist.

Democracy is not what we hate the most and what we fear the most. We need to stand up.

Where's the activism? Nobody knows. And anyone who thinks they know, like Todd Gitlin, has their head up their ass. Nobody knows. The day before every revolution that's ever happened, that revolution was impossible. The day before Rosa Parks, that was impossible. The day after, it was inevitable.

There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has sketched.

To those who had ordered them to death, one of them said: “We die because the people are asleep and you will die because the people will awaken.”

Now many such things may be done without intitling the people to rise in arms. A gross, flagrant, and palpable abuse no doubt will do it, as if they should be required to pay a tax equal to half or third of their substance.

I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.

It does not do to rely too much on silent majorities, Evey, for silence is a fragile thing, one loud noise, and its gone. But the people are so cowed and disorganised. A few might take the opportunity to protest, but it'll just be a voice crying in the wilderness. Noise is relative to the silence preceding it. The more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap. Our masters have not heard the people's voice for generations, Evey and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.

There are no outdoor sports as graceful as throwing stones at a dictatorship.

You can Jail a Revolutionary but you can't jail the Revolution. You can run a freedom fighter around the country, but you can't run freedom fighting around the country. You can murder a liberator, but you can't murder liberation.

People resist exploitation. They resist as actively as they can, as passively as they must.