Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.Collection: Society
The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.Collection: Good
Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.Collection: Freedom
Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme.Collection: Government
Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.Collection: Religion
The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.Collection: Experience
You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power - he's free again.Collection: Power
It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.Collection: Failure
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.Collection: War
Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.Collection: Truth
It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.Collection: Design
Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.Collection: Travel
I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever.Collection: Education
Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.Collection: Religion
The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.Collection: War
For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.Collection: Government
In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.
For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.
How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold?
The name of 'reform' simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.
Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.
The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.
Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.
A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.
Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you - you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.
The clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble.
It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.
When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.
Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.
Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.
Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word 'modernity' if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.
If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?
First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.
Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one's well-being.
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.
There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.
Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
You must understand, the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators.Collection: Christian
The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. "One word of truth outweighs the world.Collection: Truth
What would things been like [in Russia] if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there, paling with terror at every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people?Collection: Russia
If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.'Collection: Men
To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.Collection: Education
You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.Collection: Lying