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 SOLZHENITSYNThere are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.
More Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes
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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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Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
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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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A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.
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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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The name of ‘reform’ simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.
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When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.
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The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.
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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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Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
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It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
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The next war… may well bury Western civilization forever.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.
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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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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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Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.
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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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There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.
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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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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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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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