Quotes By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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

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.

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

Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.

The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.

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.

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

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.

Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold?

There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.

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.

Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.

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

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.

We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.

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.

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