Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quotes

The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.

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

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.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The revolution is an amalgam of former Party functionaries, quasi- democrats, KGB officers, and black-market wheeler-dealers, who are standing in power now and have represented a dirty hybrid unseen in world history.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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 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

When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Our envy of others devours us most of all.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The name of "reform" simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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 Solzhenitsyn

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The one and only substitute for experience which we have not ourselves had is art, literature.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I cannot suggest political ways out, that is the task of politicians, so it is simply that those who accuse me of this do not know how to read.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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 Solzhenitsyn

Generosity is a two-edged virtue for an artist, it nourishes his imagination but has a fatal effect on his routine.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Religion 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 Solzhenitsyn

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.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul, today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The next war may well bury Western civilization forever.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn