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.
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
-
-
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.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
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.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
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.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
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 SOLZHENITSYN -
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.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
The name of ‘reform’ simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
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.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
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.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
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.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
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.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
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 SOLZHENITSYN -
A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one’s well-being.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN