Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.

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.

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.

It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.

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.

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.

Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.

We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.

You can have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in you power.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

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.

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.

If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?

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.

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

Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.

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.

First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.

Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

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.

The name of “reform” simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.

The next war… may well bury Western civilization forever.