The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.
Author
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
20 quotations
About Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet and Russian author and dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison system. He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". His nonfiction work The Gulag Archipelago "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state" and sold tens of millions of copies.
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by Aleksandr SolzhenitsynA state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.
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 emoti…
Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
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 i…
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 mode…
Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.
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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.
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 i…
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 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.
The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.
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.
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 memor…
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 emoti…
The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
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.
It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.