Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

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 nations heart, the excision of its memory.

“So in our own poor hides and from our miserable comrades we learn the nature of satiety. Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. Its the same with happiness, the very same...happiness doesnt depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. Theres a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied.”