Alexander Solzhenitsyn
» Affection » “One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.”
» Arts and Artists » “Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.”
» Censorship » “I 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. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer’s pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.”
» Censorship » “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 nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.”
» Communism and Socialism » “For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.”
» Happiness » “A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.”
» Law and Lawyers » “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.”
» Lies and Lying » “In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.”
» Literature » “Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers — such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a fa
