Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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. – 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. – 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. – 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. – 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. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The name of ‘reform’ simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. – 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. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature. – 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. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. – 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. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
