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.
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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Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience… from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
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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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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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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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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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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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Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
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The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.
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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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Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.
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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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In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.
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Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
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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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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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It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
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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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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 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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Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.
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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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It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
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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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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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There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.
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