Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

A Russian novelist, dramatist and historian. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, returning to Russia in 1994.
(1918 - 2008)

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression that the loss of courage extends to the entire society.

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

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

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.

Fools take to themselves the respect that is given to their office. Aesop It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 his own heart? [Human Relations]

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.

It is not the level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes are within our power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him. [Happiness]

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.

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.

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