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.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNBlow 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.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNViolence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNOwn only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNHow can you expect a man who’s warm to understand one who’s cold?
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNFor 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 SOLZHENITSYNWoe 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 SOLZHENITSYNThe sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
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.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNIt would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNIf one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNThe next war… may well bury Western civilization forever.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNFor us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNFor us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNIt 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 SOLZHENITSYNReligion 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 SOLZHENITSYNFirst 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