Stoyanov Aleksandr Quotes

#1. Shukhov ate his supper without bread
a double portion and bread on top of it would be too rich. So he'd save the bread. You get no thanks from your belly
it always forgets what you've just done for it and comes begging again the next day. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#2. Nobody else exists to me when he lands. Everything stops existing when he takes off, as if he takes it all with him when he goes up there, to places I'll never see again. That vast open non-place of emptiness that only becomes significant when his comrades are there, too, and of course the enemy fighters guarding the bombers bound for Berlin. #Quote by Aleksandr Voinov

#3. Beat a dog once and you only have to show him the whip. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#4. More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God: That's why this all happened."

In the process [the process of his 50 year study of the Russian Revolution] I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have contributed eight volumes toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God, that's why this has happened. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#5. As early as 1921 interrogations usually took place at night. At that time, too, they shone automobile lights in the prisoner's face (the Ryazan Cheka - Stelmakh). And at the Lubyanka in 1926 (according to the testimony of Berta Gandal) they made use of the hot-air heating system to fill the cell first with icy-cold and then with stinking hot air. And there was an airtight cork-lined cell in which there was no ventilation and they cooked the prisoners. The poet Klyuyev was apparently confined in such a cell and Berta Gandal also. A participant in the Yaroslavl uprising of 1918, Vasily Aleksandrovich Kasyanov, described how the heat in such a cell was turned up until your blood began to ooze through your pores. When they saw this happening through the peephole, they would put the prisoner on a stretcher and take him off to sign his confession. The "hot" and "salty" methods of the "gold" period are well known. And in Georgia in 1926 they used lighted cigarettes to burn the hands of prisoners under interrogation. In Metekhi Prison they pushed prisoners into a cesspool in the dark. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#6. He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#7. Evidently, evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope. But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme danger or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#8. Together with an elderly artist (I regret that I don't remember his name) he occupied a separate room in the barracks. And there Yuri painted for nothing schmaltzy pictures such as Nero's Feast and the Chorus of Elves and the like for the German officers on the commandant's staff. In return, he was given food. The slops for which the POW officers stood in line with their mess tins from 6 a.m. on, while the Ordners beat them with sticks and the cooks with ladles, were not enough to sustain life. At evening, Yuri could see from the windows of their room the one and only picture for which his artistic talent had been given him: the evening mist hovering above a swampy meadow encircled by barbed wire; a multitude of bonfires; and, around the bonfires, beings who had once been Russian officers but had now become beastlike creatures who gnawed the bones of dead horses, who baked patties from potato rinds, who smoked manure and were all swarming with lice. Not all those two-legged creatures had died as yet. Not all of them had yet lost the capacity for intelligible speech, and one could see in the crimson reflections of the bonfires how a belated understanding was dawning on those faces which were descending to the Neanderthal. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#9. It is astonishing that Communism has been writing about itself in the most open way, in black and white, for 125 years, and even more openly, more candidly in the beginning. The [book:Communist Manifesto|30474, for instance, which everyone knows by name and which almost no one takes the trouble to read, contains even more terrible things than what has actually been done. It is perfectly amazing. The whole world can read, everyone is literate, yet somehow no one wants to understand. Humanity acts as if it does not understand what Communism is, as if it does not want to understand, is not capable of understanding. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#10. The Communist leaders respect only firmness and have contempt for persons who continually give in to them. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#11. You must go deeper into Russia - 150 kilometres from Moscow or more, and look there. The kids are fed with cattle feed - people don't get paid for half a year. #Quote by Aleksandr Lebed

#12. If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being? #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#13. Not all of me shall die. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#14. He ate his supper without bread. A double helping and 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. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#15. I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#16. It is a brave man who is the first to sit down during a standing ovation. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#17. Only an extraordinary person can turn opportunity into reality. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#18. You're with me," Dan murmured against Vadim's lips. "In my thoughts, my heart, my mind, no matter what I am doing. I goddamned need you, and I want you - always. #Quote by Aleksandr Voinov

#19. If you'd lie with scorpions, you need a taste for poison. #Quote by Aleksandr Voinov

#20. She was wonderful, in spite of everything she was wonderful. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#21. No time for books, no patience. What good would they do? They don't tell you how to survive."
"No, they don't do that. They are reason, not tool." Vadim smirked. "They hold more truth than Pravda. Politburo can't lie in Pushkin. Pushkin was there before we became Soviets. It means ... if we have past, we have future." ( ... ) "At least I know that there are many truths. It's about learning to think different thoughts. Know things that you never felt. You could know what being rich feels like, or being in love, without ever getting real feeling. #Quote by Aleksandr Voinov

#22. Tell me why I shouldn't shoot you," Stefano murmured. Low, intimate, just between them.
"Fun ... would be over too fast? #Quote by Aleksandr Voinov

#23. It was my view that the catastrophe ... could have been avoided if Vasilevsky had taken the position he should have. He could have taken a different position ... but he didn't do that, and as a result, in my view, he had a hand in the destruction of thousands of Red Army fighters in the Kharkov campaign. #Quote by Aleksandr Vasilevsky

#24. We have been fortunate enough to live at a time when virtue, though it does not triumph, is nonetheless not always tormented by attack dogs. Beaten down, sickly, virtue has now been allowed to enter in all its tatters and sit in the corner, as long as it doesn't raise its voice. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#25. A human being," Kondrasev continued, "possesses from his birth a certain essence, the nucleus, as it were, of the human being. His 'I'. And it's still uncertain which forms which: whether life forms the man or man, with his strong spirit, forms his life! Because" - Kondrashev-Ivanov suddenly lowered his voice and leaned toward Nerzhin, who was again sitting on the block - "because he has something to measure himself against, something he can look to. Because he has in him an image of perfection which in rare moments suddenly emerges before his spiritual gaze. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#26. Let us put it generally: if a regime is immoral, its subjects are free from all obligations to it. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#27. Dan's voice was rough and low as he murmured against Vadim's lips. 'I hate you, Russkie.' No. He didn't, but he couldn't find the right word for this. This feeling. Hatred was the closest he could get. The alternative was still unthinkable. #Quote by Aleksandr Voinov

#28. Who will dare say he has defined art? #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#29. Dan. His. Partner. Comrade. Lover. His again. #Quote by Aleksandr Voinov

#30. I dare hope that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#31. It is the artist who realizes that there is a supreme force above him and works gladly away as a small apprentice under God's heaven. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#32. A storm breaks trees. It only bends grass. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#33. ... the very concept of happiness is conditional, a fiction. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#34. The harder life is for a man when he is young, the easier it will be in the future. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#35. One drop of truth can outweigh an ocean of lies #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#36. 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. #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#37. The earlier, the more fun. Why put it off? It's the atomic age! #Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn