A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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

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

Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you - you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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.
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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn


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

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

How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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.
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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is the artist who realizes that there is a supreme force above him and works gladly away as a small apprentice under God's heaven.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn