Quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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.

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?

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

Fools take to themselves the respect that is given to their office. Aesop It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

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

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

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

The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.

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.

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

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.

The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

You only have power over people so long as you dont take everything away from them. But when youve robbed a man of everything, hes no longer in your power - hes free again.

The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.

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

Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.

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

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