Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNYou 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.
More Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes
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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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Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
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The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.
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Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
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Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.
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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.
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It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
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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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Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.
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Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience… from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
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A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.
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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.
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A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
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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.
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How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand one who’s cold?
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The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
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For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
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For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
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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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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.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN