Bless you, prison, for having been in my life! — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I am deeply convinced that God is present both in the lives of every person and also in the lives of entire nations. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Good or evil–you cannot build your life apart from this distinction. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

History is too slow for our life, for our hearts. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

For me faith is the foundation and support of one’s life. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A hard life improves the vision. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The essence of life will never be captured by even the greatest of formulas. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In every life there is one particular event that is decisive for the entire person–for his fate, his convictions, his passions. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

As the two–thousand–year–old saying goes, you can have eyes and still not see. But a hard life improves vision. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Each person has his special moment of life when he unfolded himself to the fullest, felt to the deepest, and expressed himself to the utmost, to himself and to others. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes a person’s noblest impulses. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A whole week, a single campaign, a month, a week, even a day was far more than enough to cut a company or platoon to ribbons or cripple a man for life: it needed only a quarter of an hour. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Happiness doesn’t depend on the actual number of blessings we manage to scratch from life, only our attitude towards them. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self–destruction. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

One word of truth outweighs the whole world. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word ‘modernity’ if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There is something predetermined in the mutual attraction between Germany and Russia. Otherwise, this attraction would not have survived two ghastly World Wars. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

All classifications in this world lack sharp boundaries, and all transitions are gradual. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If you wanted to put the world to rights, who should you begin with: yourself or others? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The task of the artist is to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and the outrage of what man has done to it, and poignantly to let people know. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The 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 Solzhenitsyn

One 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 Solzhenitsyn

The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. ‘One word of truth outweighs the world. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Only an extraordinary person can turn opportunity into reality. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

But nothing is all black in nature. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A human being is all hope and impatience. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If we live in a state of constant fear, can we remain human? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Every human act can be disguised with a coating of gilt. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I will tell you something else: it is a major responsibility not only of portraiture but of all human communication for each of us to help everyone else discover the best that is in him. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit… — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

But it is human to be outraged by injustice, even to the point of courting destruction! — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I insist on believing that beauty elevates human beings. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Nowadays we don’t think much of a man’s love for an animal; we laugh at people who are attached to cats. But if we stop loving animals, aren’t we bound to stop loving humans too? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Human beings are better and lazier than their rules and instructions. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We 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 Solzhenitsyn

Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one’s well–being. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I 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 Solzhenitsyn

The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience… from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Thus, literature, together with language, preserves and protects a nation’s soul. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Oh, how hard it is to part with power! This one has to understand. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power–he’s free again. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us…than the need for any external expansion of our power. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Someone that you have deprived of everything is no longer in your power. He is once again entirely free. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie! — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Freedom or prison––what’s the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Evil people always support each other; that is their chief strength. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The price of cowardice will only be evil. We shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

One should not ascribe the evil deeds of individual leaders or political regimes to an innate fault of the Russian people and their country. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either–but right through every human heart… — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If we look far into the future, one can see a time in the 21st century when both Europe and the USA will be in dire need of Russia as an ally. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning than the Bolshevik, the self–styled Soviet regime. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Yes, you live with your feet in the mud and there’s no time to be thinking about how you got in or how you’re going to get out. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

During my time in the camps, I had got to know the enemies of the human race quite well: they respect the big fist and nothing else; the harder you slug them, the safer you will be. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There is a law of time, a law of oblivion: glory to the dead; life to the living. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Some are bound to die young. By dying young a person stays young in people’s memory. If he burns brightly before he dies, his brightness shines for all time. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Of course, my views developed in the course of time. But I have always believed in what I did and never acted against my conscience. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You should rejoice that you’re in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You took my freedom away a long time ago and you can’t give it back because you haven’t got it yourself. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn