Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn War Quotations

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.

Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.

To coexist with communism on the same planet is impossible. Either it will spread, cancer-like, to destroy mankind, or else mankind will have to rid itself of communism (and even then face lengthy treatment for secondary tumors).

A whole week, a single campaign, a month, a week, even a day was far more than enough to cut a company or platoon to ribbons or cripple a man for life: it needed only a quarter of an hour.

Any fool can bomb a train, but just try sorting out the mess.

It takes a fool to rush off to war!

Only a magician can fix a head on a body, but any fool can lop it off.

The Communists have for decades loudly proclaimed their goal of destroying the bourgeois world, while the West merely smiled at what seemed to be an extravagant joke.

I would rather have the United States as the world's policeman than the Soviet Union as the world's jailer.

You know the words from the Bible: 'Build not on sand, but on rock....' Tyrant leaders respect only firmness...and laugh at persons who give in to them.

Communism will never be halted by negotiations or through the machinations of detente. It can only be halted by force from without or by disintegration from within.

Nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime.

To reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. Such a rejection is more than a political act. It is a protest of our souls against those who would have us forget the concepts of good and evil.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction.

The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us...than the need for any external expansion of our power.

There is something predetermined in the mutual attraction between Germany and Russia. Otherwise, this attraction would not have survived two ghastly World Wars.