Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Quotes

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

Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one's well-being.

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

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

Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.

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

The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.

There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.

We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.