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.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNA state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
More Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes
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The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.
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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 would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
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When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.
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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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Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
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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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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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The next war… may well bury Western civilization forever.
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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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Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
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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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There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.
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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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Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.
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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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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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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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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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In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.
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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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It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
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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 sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
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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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Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.
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