Quotes from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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

Call no day happy 'til it is done; call no man happy til he is dead.

After all, man is a complicated being, why should he be explainable by logic?

A leader should not be a man who arbitrarily imported his own ideas but the essential focal point for a group of people who trusted one another and worked for a common aim.

... a man can safely sacrifice a great deal as long as he clings to the essential.

Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.

To preserve his life, should a man pay everything that gives it color, scent and excitement?

It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

Human nature, if it changes at all, changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth.

Was 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".

A poet cannot be a Party member ... without paying the price.

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.

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 beings.

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

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

The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe

A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country

Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme.

Let us drive away those cruel, greedy oppressors, governments, and the new ones, having just laid aside grenades and rifles, will be just and understanding. Far from it.

The central government possesses no plan of finding the way out of this blind alley.

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.

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

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