Quotes By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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.

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

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

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

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

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 clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble.

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

There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.

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.

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

Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.

We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.

Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word "modernity" if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.