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.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNWe have arrived at an intellectual chaos.
More Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes
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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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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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The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
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The next war… may well bury Western civilization forever.
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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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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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When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.
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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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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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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 man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.
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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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Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
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We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.
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