It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNIt is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
More Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes
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Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.
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Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.
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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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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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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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Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.
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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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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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The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.
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There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.
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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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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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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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It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
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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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The name of ‘reform’ simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.
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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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The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
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A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
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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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