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.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNToday 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.
More Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes
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Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
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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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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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A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.
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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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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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A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.
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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 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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