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.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNLiterature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience… from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
More Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes
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The name of ‘reform’ simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.
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A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
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In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.
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Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
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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.
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Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one’s well-being.
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It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
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