Quotes from 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.

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.

Let your memory be your travel bag.

A storm breaks trees. It only bends grass.

Lord, give me the strength to accomplish what You've given me to do and the faith to trust You that what I haven't been able to accomplish You've already assigned to someone else.

Why should I trust you? We haven't drunk from the same bowl of soup.

The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. "One word of truth outweighs the world.

You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.

The solemn pledge to abstain from telling the truth was called socialist realism.

Nowadays we don't think much of a man's love for an animal; we laugh at people who are attached to cats. But if we stop loving animals, aren't we bound to stop loving humans too?

We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.

We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.

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

One drop of truth can outweigh an ocean of lies

Truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.

The concept of maximum promotion of human rights to the expense of the majority of people in fact undermines the entire concept of the human community.

No one can bar the road to truth and to advance its cause I'm ready to accept even death.

Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one's well-being.

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.

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression that the loss of courage extends to the entire society.

For a country to have a great writer is to have another government.

One can build the Empire State Building, discipline the Prussian army, make a state hierarchy mightier than God, yet fail to overcome the unaccountable superiority of certain human biengs.