If you ever get twenty-five years for nothing, if you find yourself wearing four number patches on your clothes, holding your hands permanently behind your back, submitting to searches morning and evening, working until you are utterly exhausted, dragged into the cooler whenever someone denounces you, trodden deeper and deeper into the ground-from the hole you're in, the fine words of the great humanists will sound like the chatter of the well-fed and free.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynI am a convinced and consistent critic of party-parliamentarism. I am for non-partisan elections of true people's representatives who are accountable to their regions and districts; and who in case of unsatisfactory work can be recalled. I do understand and respect the formation of groups on economical, cooperative, territorial, educational, professional and industrial principles, but I see nothing organic in political parties. Politically motivated ties can be unstable and quite often they have selfish ulterior motives.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynOwn only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynWhen I was young, the early death of my father cast a shadow over me - and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final, milestone of one's existence.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynI refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynWe are all human, and our senses are quicker to prompt us than our reason. Every man gives off a scent, and that scent tells you how to act before your head does.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynThe central government possesses no plan of finding the way out of this blind alley.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynSociety must cease to look upon 'progress' as something desirable. 'Eternal Progress' is a nonsensical myth. What must be implemented is not a 'steadily expanding economy', but a zero growth economy, a stable economy. Economic growth is not only unnecessary but ruinous.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynI think the gap between the rich and the poor is a dangerous phenomenon in Russia and it needs the attention of the state. The only reasonable way to correct the situation today is not to go after big businesses, but to give breathing room to medium and small businesses. That means protecting citizens and small entrepreneurs from arbitrary rule and from corruption. It means investing the revenues from the national natural resources into the national infrastructure, education and health care. And we must learn to do so without shameful theft and embezzlement.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynVoting for impersonal parties and their programmes is a false substitute for the only true way to elect people's representatives: voting by an actual person for an actual candidate.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynIf decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person's mind begins to roam irretrievably. One's fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynThe 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.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynOne 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.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynA great disaster had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynI cannot suggest political ways out, that is the task of politicians, so it is simply that those who accuse me of this do not know how to read.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynI am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynHuman rights' are a fine thing, but how can we make ourselves sure that our rights do not expand at the expense of the rights of others. A society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing to adversity. If we do not wish to be ruled by a coercive authority, then each of us must rein himself in...A stable society is achieved not by balancing opposing forces but by conscious self-limitation: by the principle that we are always duty-bound to defer to the sense of moral justice.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynThus, literature, together with language, preserves and protects a nation's soul.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynThe line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynIf I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.'
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynThe task must be to banish from mankind's thought the idea that anybody has the right to use force against righteousness, against justice, against mutual agreements.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynEven if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynEuropean democracy was originally imbued with a sense of Christian responsibility and self-discipline, but these spiritual principles have been gradually losing their force. Spiritual independence is being pressured on all sides by the dictatorship of self-satisfied vulgarity, of the latest fads, and of group interests.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynIt was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynTo reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. Such a rejection is more than a political act. It is a protest of our souls against those who would have us forget the concepts of good and evil.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynFreedom or prison--what's the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynWas it Gorky who had said, "If your children are no better than you are, you have fathered them in vain, indeed you have lived in vain".
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn