A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynLiterature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynViolence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynThe one and only substitute for experience which we have not ourselves had is art, literature. We have been given a miraculous faculty: Despite the differences of language, customs and social structure we are able to communicate life experience from one whole nation to another, to communicate a difficult national experience many decades long which the second of the two has never experienced.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn