3 December 2020 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience… from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
3 December 2020 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 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.
3 December 2020 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
3 December 2020 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 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.
3 December 2020 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 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.
3 December 2020 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.
