Alexander Solzhenitsyn

(540 votes)   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.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
1918-, Russian Novelist

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(150 votes)   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 fatade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
1918-, Russian Novelist

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(126 votes)   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.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
1918-, Russian Novelist

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(89 votes)   The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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(88 votes)   Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

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

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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(81 votes)   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.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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(81 votes)   Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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(80 votes)   For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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(80 votes)   For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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(80 votes)   Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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(78 votes)   The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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(77 votes)   The clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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(75 votes)   How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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(72 votes)   Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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