Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
You only 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 your power — he's free again.

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Here, lads, we live by the law of the taiga. But even here people manage to live. D'you know who are the ones the camps finish off? Those who lick other men's left-overs, those who set store by the doctors, and those who peach on their mates.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The thoughts of a prisoner—they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is the center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you, "You are under arrest."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Call no day happy 'til it is done; call no man happy til he is dead.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
After all, man is a complicated being, why should he be explainable by logic?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Archeologists have not discovered stages of human existence so early that they were without art. Right back in the early morning twilights of mankind we received it from Hands which we were too slow to discern. And we were too slow to ask: FOR WHAT PURPOSE have we been given this gift? What are we to do with it?
And they were mistaken, and will always be mistaken, who prophesy that art will disintegrate, that it will outlive its forms and die. It is we who shall die — art will remain. And shall we comprehend, even on the day of our destruction, all its facets and all its possibilities?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Evil people always support each other; that is their chief strength.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The divergent scales of values scream in discordance, they dazzle and daze us, and in order that it might not be painful we steer clear of all other values, as though from insanity, as though from illusion, and we confidently judge the whole world according to our own home values. Which is why we take for the greater, more painful and less bearable disaster not that which is in fact greater, more painful and less bearable, but that which lies closest to us. Everything which is further away, which does not threaten this very day to invade our threshold — with all its groans, its stifled cries, its destroyed lives, even if it involves millions of victims — this we consider on the whole to be perfectly bearable and of tolerable proportions.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
People who are at ease with their consciences always look happy.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art.
And no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness — and violence, decrepit, will fall.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person's mind begins to roam irretrievably. One's fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
All my life I have thought of mathematicians as Rosicrucians of some kind, and I always regretted that I never had the opportunity of being initiated into their secrets.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Any fool can bomb a train, but just try sorting out the mess.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A man should build a house with his own hands before before he calls himself an engineer.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It was wrong to be too pragmatic, to judge people solely by results; it was more humane to judge by intentions.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
You took my freedom away a long time ago and you can't give it back because you haven't got it yourself.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
One world, one mankind cannot exist in the face of six, four or even two scales of values: We shall be torn apart by this disparity of rhythm, this disparity of vibrations.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn