It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNThe 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.
More Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes
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Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.
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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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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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The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.
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Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying 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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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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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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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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Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
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Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.
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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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If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?
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The next war… may well bury Western civilization forever.
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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 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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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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When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.
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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 man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.
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We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.
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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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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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Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN