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
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
The name of “reform” simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The next war… may well bury Western civilization forever.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.
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
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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
You can have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in you power.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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
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
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
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
Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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.
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
