Quotes from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is not the level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes are within our power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.

If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

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.

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

Communism will never be halted by negotiations or through the machinations of detente. It can only be halted by force from without or by disintegration from within.

Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.

I would rather have the United States as the world's policeman than the Soviet Union as the world's jailer.

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

You know the words from the Bible: 'Build not on sand, but on rock....' Tyrant leaders respect only firmness...and laugh at persons who give in to them.

The Communists have for decades loudly proclaimed their goal of destroying the bourgeois world, while the West merely smiled at what seemed to be an extravagant joke.

When you have robbed a man of everything, he is no longer in your power. He is free again.

Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.

Only a magician can fix a head on a body, but any fool can lop it off.

A whole week, a single campaign, a month, a week, even a day was far more than enough to cut a company or platoon to ribbons or cripple a man for life: it needed only a quarter of an hour.

The generation now coming out of Western schools is unable to distinguish good from bad. Even those words are unacceptable. This results in impaired thinking ability.

The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles.

One world, one mankind cannot exist in the face of six, four or even two scales of values: We shall be torn apart by this disparity of rhythm, this disparity of vibrations.

Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide process, with East and West yielding the same results, and once again for the same reason: Men have forgotten God.

The task of the artist is to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and the outrage of what man has done to it, and poignantly to let people know.

A great disaster had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.

Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

How quickly a zek (a prisoner) gets cheeky-or, putting it in literary language, how quickly a man's requirements grow.