Best Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.

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.

I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances -- from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.

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

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.

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

Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers -- such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a fa?ade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.

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

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.

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

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