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 SOLZHENITSYNI 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.
More Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes
-
-
It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
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.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience… from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
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 -
The next war… may well bury Western civilization forever.
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 -
How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand one who’s cold?
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN -
The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
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 -
Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN