Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotations

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

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.

There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Shall I describe the happiness it gave me to go into the classroom and pick up the chalk? ... It seemed to me the supreme, heartbreaking happiness to enter a classroom carrying a register as that bell rang, and start a lesson with the mysterious air of one about to unfold wonders.

Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same with happiness, the very same...happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. There's a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: 'Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied.

History has in different questions laid out some tremendous turnabouts and curves.

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.

The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us... than the need for any external expansion of our power.

When I was young, the early death of my father cast a shadow over me - and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final, milestone of one's existence.

Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as "we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology". The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point.

For me faith is the foundation and support of one's life.

Religion itself cannot but be dynamic. In order to combat modern materialistic mores, to fight nihilism and egotism, religion must also develop, must be flexible in its forms, and it must have a correlation with the cultural forms of the epoch.

The term "national idea" is an unclear one. One might think of it as a widely shared understanding among a people as to the desired way of life in their country, an idea that holds sway over the population. A unifying concept like that can be useful, but should never be created artificially or imposed top-down by the powers-that-be.

One should not ascribe the evil deeds of individual leaders or political regimes to an innate fault of the Russian people and their country.

We should clearly understand that only the voluntary and conscientious acceptance by a people of its guilt can ensure the healing of a nation. Unremitting reproaches from outside are counterproductive.

Voting for impersonal parties and their programmes is a false substitute for the only true way to elect people's representatives: voting by an actual person for an actual candidate.

I am deeply convinced that God is present both in the lives of every person and also in the lives of entire nations.

Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad.

When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. Admittedly, this was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by the natural disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.

When the whole discussion of "developing a national idea" hastily began in post-Soviet Russia, I tried to pour cold water on it with the objection that, after all the devastating losses we had experienced, it would be quite sufficient to have just one task: the preservation of a dying people.

When Russia started to regain some of its strength as an economy and as a state, the West's reaction - perhaps a subconscious one, based on erstwhile fears - was panic.

The perception of the West as mostly a "knight of democracy" has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals.

If we look far into the future, one can see a time in the 21st century when both Europe and the USA will be in dire need of Russia as an ally.

There is something predetermined in the mutual attraction between Germany and Russia. Otherwise, this attraction would not have survived two ghastly World Wars.

I was always optimistic. And I held to and was guided by my views.

I have always had that inner drive, since my birth. And I have always devoted myself gladly to work - to work and to the struggle.

Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!

Let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.

Even the most rational approach to ethics is defenseless if there isn't the will to do what is right.

One word of truth outweighs the whole world.

Happiness doesn't depend on the actual number of blessings we manage to scratch from life, only our attitude towards them....

In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars.

The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe

Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask; by whom has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?

This deliberately nurtured hatred then spreads to all that is alive, to life itself, to the world with its colors, sounds, and shapes, to the human body. The embittered art of the twentieth century is perishing as a result of this ugly hate, for art is fruitless without love. In the East art has collapsed because it has been knocked down and trampled upon, but in the West the fall has been voluntary, a decline into a contrived and pretentious quest where the artist, instead of attempting to reveal the divine plan, tries to put himself in the place of God.

With such global events looming over us like mountains, nay, like entire mountain ranges, it may seem incongruous and inappropriate to recall that the primary key to our being or non-being resides in each individual human heart, in the heart's preference for specific good or evil. Yet this remains true even today, and it is, in fact, the most reliable key we have. The social theories that promised so much have demonstrated their bankruptcy, leaving us at a dead end.

In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

If we live in a state of constant fear, can we remain human?

The most intense patriotism always flourishes in the rear.

It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.

There also exists another alliance - at first glance a strange one, a surprising one - but if you think about it, in fact, one which is well grounded and easy to understand. This is the alliance between our Communist leaders and your capitalists. This alliance is not new. ... We observe continuous and steady support by the businessmen of the West of the Soviet Communist leaders.

I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it - from The Gulag Archipelago

Why can't you understand? The stars fall down now and then. The gaps have to be filled.

If... if... We didn't love freedom enough. And even more - we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! ........... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day. There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail. Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days. The three extra days were for leap years.

Lord, give me the strength to accomplish what You've given me to do and the faith to trust You that what I haven't been able to accomplish You've already assigned to someone else.

Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit.

If you wanted to put the world to rights, who should you begin with: yourself or others?

To preserve his life, should a man pay everything that gives it color, scent and excitement?

If you ever get twenty-five years for nothing, if you find yourself wearing four number patches on your clothes, holding your hands permanently behind your back, submitting to searches morning and evening, working until you are utterly exhausted, dragged into the cooler whenever someone denounces you, trodden deeper and deeper into the ground-from the hole you're in, the fine words of the great humanists will sound like the chatter of the well-fed and free.

Let all of us who shared the prison soup meet again in better times!

Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for-all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him.

When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist?

A poet cannot be a Party member ... without paying the price.

There is eternal simplicity to a solution once it has been discovered!

Was it Gorky who said: "If your children are no better than you are, you have fathered in vain, indeed you have lived in vain.

And keep as few things as possible, so that you don't have to fear for them. Give them up without a struggle-because otherwise the humiliation will poison your heart. They will take them away from you in a fight, and trying to hold onto your property will only leave you with a bloodied mouth ... But by owning things and trembling about their fate aren't you forfeiting the rare opportunity of observing and understanding?

Every act of perception has an emotional coloring.

It's quite enough to show a well-beaten dog the whip.

Scientific research? Only when not at the cost of ethics-and first of all, those of the researchers themselves.