Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Profession : Author

Birth : December 11, 1918

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

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

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

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

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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

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

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

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn