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 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.
More Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes
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The next war… may well bury Western civilization forever.
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When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.
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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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For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
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Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience… from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
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In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.
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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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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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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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Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
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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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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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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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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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The name of ‘reform’ simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN