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 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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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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It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
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We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.
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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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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.
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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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The next war… may well bury Western civilization forever.
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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.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN