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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

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You Only Have Power

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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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.

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I Was Always Optimistic. And I Held To And Was Guided By My Views.

I Dedicate This To All Those Who Did Not Live To Tell It. And May They Please Forgive Me For Not Having Seen It All Nor Remembered It All, For Not Having Divined All Of It - From The Gulag Archipelago

We Have To Condemn The Very Idea That Some People Have The Right To Repress Others.

Every Act Of Perception Has An Emotional Coloring.

What A Force Is Laughter.

It Makes Me Happier, More Secure, To Think That I Do Not Have To Plan And Manage Everything For Myself, That I Am Only A Sword Made Sharp To Smite The Unclean Forces, An Enchanted Sword To Cleave And Disperse Them. Grant, O Lord, That I May Not Break As I Strike! Let Me Not Fall From Thy Hand!

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.

Good Or Evil-you Cannot Build Your Life Apart From This Distinction.

We Will Die, But Art Will Remain.

Work Was Like A Stick. It Had Two Ends. When You Worked For The Knowing You Gave Them Quality; When You Worked For A Fool You Simply Gave Him Eyewash.

Who Has The Skill To Make A Narrow, Obstinate Human Being Aware Of Others' Far-off Grief And Joy, To Make Him Understand Dimensions And Delusions He Himself Has Never Lived Through? Propaganda, Coercion, And Scientific Proofs Are Powerless. But Happily, In Our World There Is A Way. It Is Art, And It Is Literature.

I Hope That No One Present Will Suspect Me Of Offering My Personal Criticism Of The Western System To Present Socialism As An Alternative. Having Experienced Applied Socialism In A Country Where The Alternative Has Been Realized, I Certainly Will Not Speak For It. The Well-known Soviet Mathematician Shafarevich, A Member Of The Soviet Academy Of Science, Has Written A Brilliant Book Under The Title Socialism; It Is A Profound Analysis Showing That Socialism Of Any Type And Shade Leads To A Total Destruction Of The Human Spirit And To A Leveling Of Mankind Into Death.

A Horrible Human Toll The Russian Orthodox Church Suffered Throughout Almost The Entire 20th Century. The Church Is Just Rising From Its Knees. Our Young Post-soviet State Is Just Learning To Respect The Church As An Independent Institution.

Let Your Memory Be Your Travel Bag.

There Is Eternal Simplicity To A Solution Once It Has Been Discovered!

A Man Is Happy So Long As He Chooses To Be Happy And Nothing Can Stop Him.

Thus, Literature, Together With Language, Preserves And Protects A Nation's Soul.

To Stand Up For Truth Is Nothing. For Truth, You Must Sit In Jail.

How Can You Expect A Man Who's Warm To Understand One Who's Cold?

You Took My Freedom Away A Long Time Ago And You Can't Give It Back Because You Haven't Got It Yourself.

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.

People Can Live Through Hardship, But From Hard Feelings They Perish.

The Perception Of The West As Mostly A "knight Of Democracy" Has Been Replaced With The Disappointed Belief That Pragmatism, Often Cynical And Selfish, Lies At The Core Of Western Policies. For Many Russians It Was A Grave Disillusion, A Crushing Of Ideals.

The Central Government Possesses No Plan Of Finding The Way Out Of This Blind Alley.

You Get No Thanks From Your Belly-it Always Forgets What You've Just Done For It And Comes Begging Again The Next Day.

Own Only What You Can Always Carry With You: Know Languages, Know Countries, Know People. Let Your Memory Be Your Travel Bag. Use Your Memory! Use Your Memory! It Is Those Bitter Seeds Alone Which Might Sprout And Grow Someday. Look Around You - There Are People Around You. Maybe You Will Remember One Of Them All Your Life And Later Eat Your Heart Out Because You Didn't Make Use Of The Opportunity To Ask Him Questions. And The Less You Talk, The More You'll Hear.

That Which Is Called Humanism, But What Would Be More Correctly Called Irreligious Anthropocentrism, Cannot Yield Answers To The Most Essential Questions Of Our Life

The Battleline Between Good And Evil Runs Through The Heart Of Every Man.

Unlimited Power In The Hands Of Limited People Always Leads To Cruelty.

I Dare Hope That All The Peoples Who Have Lived Through Communism Will Understand That Communism Is To Blame For The Bitter Pages Of Their History.

The Simple Act Of An Ordinary Courageous Man Is Not To Take Part, Not To Support Lies! Let That Come Into The World And Even Reign Over It, But Not Through Me. Writers And Artists Can Do More: They Can Vanquish Lies! ... Lies Can Stand Up Against Much In The World, But Not Against Art.

Violence Can Only Be Concealed By A Lie, And The Lie Can Only Be Maintained By Violence.

Macbeth's Self-justifications Were Feeble - And His Conscience Devoured Him. Yes, Even Iago Was A Little Lamb Too. The Imagination And The Spiritual Strength Of Shakespeare's Evildoers Stopped Short At A Dozen Corpses. Because They Had No Ideology.

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.

Nothing Is More Boring Than A Man With A Career.

A Hard Life Improves The Vision.

We Have Been Fortunate Enough To Live At A Time When Virtue, Though It Does Not Triumph, Is Nonetheless Not Always Tormented By Attack Dogs. Beaten Down, Sickly, Virtue Has Now Been Allowed To Enter In All Its Tatters And Sit In The Corner, As Long As It Doesn't Raise Its Voice.

Friends! Let Us Try To Help If We Are Worth Anything At All!

We Are So Attached To The Earth, And Yet We Are Incapable Of Holding Onto It.

... Scientists Have Made No Clear Effort To Become An Important, Independently Active Force Of Mankind. Whole Congresses At A Time, They Back Away From The Suffering Of Others; It Is More Comfortable To Stay Within The Bounds Of Science.

Suffering Of Others

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...

Art Thaws Even The Frozen, Darkened Soul, Opening It To Lofty Spiritual Experience.

Many Of You Have Already Found Out, And Others Will Find Out In The Course Of Their Lives, That Truth Eludes Us If We Do Not Concentrate Our Attention Totally On It's Pursuit. But Even While It Eludes Us, The Illusion Of Knowing It Still Lingers And Leads To Many Misunderstandings. Also, Truth Seldom Is Pleasant; It Is Almost Invariably Bitter.

To Do Evil A Human Being Must First Of All Believe That What He's Doing Is Good, Or Else That It's A Well-considered Act In Conformity With Natural Law. Fortunately, It Is In The Nature Of The Human Being To Seek A Justification For His Actions.

If State, Party And Social Policy Will Not Be Based On Morality, Then Mankind Has No Future To Speak Of.

A Strong Man Never Loses His Head In Defeat Or Despondency.

One Drop Of Truth Can Outweigh An Ocean Of Lies

It Is Not Because The Truth Is Too Difficult To See That We Make Mistakes... We Make Mistakes Because The Easiest And Most Comfortable Course For Us Is To Seek Insight Where It Accords With Our Emotions - Especially Selfish Ones.

In The Camp, This Meant Committing My Verse-many Thousands Of Lines-to Memory. To Help Me With This I Improvised Decimal Counting Beads And, In Transit Prisons, Broke Up Matchsticks And Used The Fragments As Tallies. As I Approached The End Of My Sentences I Grew More Confident Of My Powers Of Memory, And Began Writing Down And Memorizing Prose-dialogue At First, But Then, Bit By Bit, Whole Densely Written Passages. My Memory Found Room For Them! It Worked. But More And More Of My Time-in The End As Much As One Week Every Month-went Into The Regular Repetition Of All I Had Memorized.

I 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.

To Preserve His Life, Should A Man Pay Everything That Gives It Color, Scent And Excitement?

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.

A Decline In Courage May Be The Most Striking Feature That An Outside Observer Notices In The West Today. The Western World Has Lost Its Civic Courage . . . . Such A Decline In Courage Is Particularly Noticeable Among The Ruling And Intellectual Elite, Causing An Impression Of A Loss Of Courage By The Entire Society.

The Term "national Idea" Is An Unclear One. One Might Think Of It As A Widely Shared Understanding Among A People As To The Desired Way Of Life In Their Country, An Idea That Holds Sway Over The Population. A Unifying Concept Like That Can Be Useful, But Should Never Be Created Artificially Or Imposed Top-down By The Powers-that-be.

At What Point, Then, Should One Resist? When One's Belt Is Taken Away? When One Is Ordered To Face Into A Corner? When One Crosses The Threshold Of One's Home? An Arrest Consists Of A Series Of Incidental Irrelevancies, Of A Multitude Of Things That Do Not Matter, And There Seems No Point In Arguing About One Of Them Individually...and Yet All These Incidental Irrelevancies Taken Together Implacably Constitute The Arrest.

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.

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.

I Have Grown Used To The Fact That Public Repentance Is The Most Unacceptable Option For The Modern Politician.

Freedom! To Fill People's Mailboxes, Eyes, Ears And Brains With Commercial Rubbish Against Their Will, Television Programs That Are Impossible To Watch With A Sense Of Coherence. Freedom! To Force Information On People, Taking No Account Of Their Right Not To Accept It Or Their Right Of Peace Of Mind. Freedom! To Spit In The Eyes And Souls Of Passersby With Advertisements.

If Only It Were All So Simple! If Only There Were Evil People Somewhere Insidiously Committing Evil Deeds, And It Were Necessary Only To Separate Them From The Rest Of Us And Destroy Them. But 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?

This Is A Grave Danger: The Stoppage Of Information Between The Parts Of The Planet. Contemporary Science Knows That Such Stoppage Is The Way Of Entropy, Of Universal Destruction.

Prayers Are Like Those Appeals Of Ours. Either They Don't Get Through Or They're Returned With 'rejected' Scrawled Across 'em.

The Generation Now Coming Out Of Western Schools Is Unable To Distinguish Good From Bad. Even Those Words Are Unacceptable. This Results In Impaired Thinking Ability.

We Should Clearly Understand That Only The Voluntary And Conscientious Acceptance By A People Of Its Guilt Can Ensure The Healing Of A Nation. Unremitting Reproaches From Outside Are Counterproductive.

A Great Number Of Publications And Movies On The History Of The 20th Century - Albeit Of Uneven Quality - Are Evidence Of A Growing Demand. Quite Recently, The State-owned Tv Channel 'russia' Aired A Series Based On Varlam Shalamov's Works, Showing The Terrible, Cruel Truth About Stalin's Camps. It Was Not Watered Down.

The Fewer Limitations The Artist Imposes On His Work, The Less Chance He Has For Artistic Success.

Just As King Midas Turned Everything To Gold, Stalin Turned Everything To Mediocrity.

First Would Be The Literary Side, Then The Spiritual And Philosophical. The Political Side Is Required Principally Because Of The Necessity Of The Current Russian Position.

If You Want To Change The World, Who Do You Begin With, Yourself Or Others? I Believe If We Begin With Ourselves And Do The Things That We Need To Do And Become The Best Person We Can Be, We Have A Much Better Chance Of Changing The World For The Better.

I Have Always Had That Inner Drive, Since My Birth. And I Have Always Devoted Myself Gladly To Work - To Work And To The Struggle.

The One Who Doesn't Pull His Weight Is Not Asked To Pull, While The One Who Does, Pulls For Two.

The Price Of Cowardice Will Only Be Evil. We Shall Reap Courage And Victory Only When We Dare To Make Sacrifices.

European 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.

History Is Too Slow For Our Life, For Our Hearts.

Scientific Research? Only When Not At The Cost Of Ethics-and First Of All, Those Of The Researchers Themselves.

It Is Within The Power Of Writers And Artists To Do Much More: To Defeat The Lie!

Boris Yeltsin's Period Was Characterized By A No Less Irresponsible Attitude To People's Lives, But In Other Ways. In His Haste To Have Private Rather Than State Ownership As Quickly As Possible, Yeltsin Started A Mass, Multi-billion-dollar Fire Sale Of The National Patrimony. Wanting To Gain The Support Of Regional Leaders, Yeltsin Called Directly For Separatism And Passed Laws That Encouraged And Empowered The Collapse Of The Russian State. This Deprived Russia Of Its Historical Role For Which It Had Worked So Hard, And Lowered Its Standing In The International Community.

Our Twentieth Century Has Proved To Be More Cruel Than Preceding Centuries, And The First Fifty Years Have Not Erased All Its Horrors. Our World Is Rent Asunder By Those Same Old Cave-age Emotions Of Greed, Envy, Lack Of Control, Mutual Hostility Which Have Picked Up In Passing Respectable Pseudonyms Like Class Struggle, Radical Conflict, Struggle Of The Masses, Trade-union Disputes.

The 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.

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.

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.

I Would Rather Have The United States As The World's Policeman Than The Soviet Union As The World's Jailer.

As The Fathers Live, So The Children Play.

What Is The Most Precious Thing In The World? I See Now That It Is The Knowledge That You Have No Part In Injustice. Injustice Is Stronger Than You, It Always Was And Always Will Be, But Let It Not Be Done Through You.

The Name Of 'reform' Simply Covers What Is Latently A Process Of The Theft Of The National Heritage.

Without Any Censorship, In The West Fashionable Trends Of Thought And Ideas Are Carefully Separated From Those Which Are Not Fashionable; Nothing Is Forbidden, But What Is Not Fashionable Will Hardly Ever Find Its Way Into Periodicals Or Books Or Be Heard In Colleges. Legally Your Researchers Are Free, But They Are Conditioned By The Fashion Of The Day.

Which Of Us Can Control His Feelings?

Once The Fight Is On-strike Quickly And Often.

The One And Only Substitute For Experience Which We Have Not Ourselves Had Is Art, Literature. We Have Been Given A Miraculous Faculty: Despite The Differences Of Language, Customs And Social Structure We Are Able To Communicate Life Experience From One Whole Nation To Another, To Communicate A Difficult National Experience Many Decades Long Which The Second Of The Two Has Never Experienced.

And Keep As Few Things As Possible, So That You Don't Have To Fear For Them. Give Them Up Without A Struggle-because Otherwise The Humiliation Will Poison Your Heart. They Will Take Them Away From You In A Fight, And Trying To Hold Onto Your Property Will Only Leave You With A Bloodied Mouth ... But By Owning Things And Trembling About Their Fate Aren't You Forfeiting The Rare Opportunity Of Observing And Understanding?

Evil People Always Support Each Other; That Is Their Chief Strength.

If One Is Forever Cautious, Can One Remain A Human Being?

The Belly Is An Ungrateful Wretch, It Never Remembers Past Favors, It Always Wants More Tomorrow.

When Things Are Too Clear, They Are No Longer Interesting.

Justness Exists, Even If Few People Exist Who Feel It.

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.

A Poet Cannot Be A Party Member ... Without Paying The Price.

In All Probability An Outburst Of Desperation In The Midst Of General Submissiveness Will Always Help.

The Essence Of Life Will Never Be Captured By Even The Greatest Of Formulas.

If There Were No Executioners, There Would Be No Executions.

Ideology - That Is What Gives Evildoing Its Long-sought Justification And Gives The Evildoer The Neccessary Steadfastness And Determination... Thanks To Ideology, The Twentieth Century Was Fated To Experience Evildoing On A Scale Calculated In The Millions.

A Fish Does Not Campaign Against Fisheries-it Only Tries To Slip Through The Mesh.

We Hear A Constant Clamor For Rights, Rights, Always Rights, But So Very Little About Responsibility. And We Have Forgotten God. The Need Now Is For Selflessness, For A Spirit Of Sacrifice, For A Willingness To Put Aside Personal Gains For The Salvation Of The Whole Western World.

In Military Science There Is A Principle More Important Than "forward": It Is That The Task Should Be Proportionate To The Means.

It Is Almost Always Impossible To Evaluate At The Time Events Which You Have Already Experienced, And To Understand Their Meaning With The Guidance Of Their Effects. All The More Unpredictable And Surprising To Us Will Be The Course Of Future Events.

Truth Seldom Is Pleasant; It Is Almost Invariably Bitter.

Nothing Worthy Can Be Built On A Neglect Of Higher Meanings And On A Relativistic View Of Concepts And Culture As A Whole. Indeed, Something Greater Than A Phenomenon Confined To Art Can Be Discerned Shimmering Here Beneath The Surface - Shimmering Not With Light But With An Ominous Crimson Glow.

If 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.'

Generosity Is A Two-edged Virtue For An Artist - It Nourishes His Imagination But Has A Fatal Effect On His Routine.

We Do Not Err Because Truth Is Difficult To See. It Is Visible At A Glance. We Err Because This Is More Comfortable.

When One Is Already On The Edge Of The Grave, Why Not Resist?

There Are A Lot Of Clear Thinkers Everywhere.

Bless You, Prison, For Having Been In My Life!

... A Man Can Safely Sacrifice A Great Deal As Long As He Clings To The Essential.

As For Europe, Its Claims Towards Russia Are Fairly Transparently Based On Fears About Energy, Unjustified Fears At That.

Whenever The Tissue Of Life Is Woven Of Legalistic Relationships, This Creates An Atmosphere Of Spiritual Mediocrity That Paralyzes A Person's Noblest Impulses.

The Strength Or Weakness Of A Society Depends More On The Level Of Its Spiritual Life Than On Its Level Of Industrialization. Neither A Market Economy Nor Even General Abundance Constitutes The Crowning Achievement Of Human Life. If A Nation's Spiritual Energies Have Been Exhausted, It Will Not Be Saved From Collapse By The Most Perfect Government Structure Or By Any Industrial Development. A Tree With A Rotten Core Cannot Stand.

Too Much Art Was No Art At All. Like Candy Instead Of Bread!

Freedom Or Prison--what's The Difference? A Man Must Develop Unwavering Will Power Subject Only To His Reason.

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.

If 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.

Of Course God Is Endlessly Multi-dimensional So Every Religion That Exists On Earth Represents Some Face, Some Side Of God.

Satiety Depends Not At All On How Much We Eat, But On How We Eat. It's The Same With Happiness, The Very Same...happiness Doesn't Depend On How Many External Blessings We Have Snatched From Life. It Depends Only On Our Attitude Toward Them. There's A Saying About It In The Taoist Ethic: 'whoever Is Capable Of Contentment Will Always Be Satisfied.

If We Could All Take A Sober Look At Our History, Then We Would No Longer See This Nostalgic Attitude To The Soviet Past That Predominates Among The Less Affected Part Of Our Society.

We Didn't Love Freedom Enough.

[he] Understood The People In A New Way...the People Is Not Everyone Who Speaks Our Language, Nor Yet The Elect Marked By The Fiery Stamp Of Genius. Not By Birth, Not By The Work Of One's Hands, Not By The Wings Of Education Is One Elected Into The People. But By One's Inner Self. Everyone Forges His Inner Self Year After Year. One Must Try To Temper, To Cut, To Polish One's Soul So As To Become A Human Being. And Thereby Become A Tiny Particle Of One's Own People.

Call No Day Happy 'til It Is Done; Call No Man Happy Til He Is Dead.

One Word Of Truth Outweighs The Whole World.

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.

Do Not Pursue What Is Illusory - Property And Position: All That Is Gained At The Expense Of Your Nerves Decade After Decade, And Is Confiscated In One Fell Night. Live With A Steady Superiority Over Life - Don't Be Afraid Of Misfortune, And Do Not Yearn After Happiness; It Is, After All, All The Same: The Bitter Doesn't Last Forever, And The Sweet Never Fills The Cup To Overflowing.

The Solemn Pledge To Abstain From Telling The Truth Was Called Socialist Realism.

Telling The Truth

Woe To That Nation Whose Literature Is Disturbed By The Intervention Of Power. Because That Is Not Just A Violation Against "freedom Of Print," It Is The Closing Down Of The Heart Of The Nation, A Slashing To Pieces Of Its Memory.

We Have To Condemn Publicly The Very Idea That Some People Have The Right To Repress Others... When We Neither Punish Nor Reproach Evildoers ... We Are Ripping The Foundations Of Justice From Beneath New Generations.

Such As It Is, The Press Has Become The Greatest Power Within The Western World, More Powerful Than The Legislature, The Executive And Judiciary. One Would Like To Ask; By Whom Has It Been Elected And To Whom Is It Responsible?

If A Person Can Build A Fence Around Himself, He Is Bound To Do It.

It's Quite Enough To Show A Well-beaten Dog The Whip.

It 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.

The Thoughts Of A Prisoner - They're Not Free Either. They Keep Returning To The Same Things.

Hastiness And Superficiality Are The Psychic Diseases Of The 20th Century, And More Than Anywhere Else This Disease Is Reflected In The Press.

Human Nature Is Full Of Riddles And Contradictions; Its Very Complexity Engenders Art-and By Art I Mean The Search For Something More Than Simple Linear Formulations, Flat Solutions, Oversimplified Explanations.

There Are Defendants Whom The Judges Are Afraid Of.

If... If... We Didn't Love Freedom Enough. And Even More - We Had No Awareness Of The Real Situation. We Spent Ourselves In One Unrestrained Outburst In 1917, And Then We Hurried To Submit. We Submitted With Pleasure! ........... We Purely And Simply Deserved Everything That Happened Afterward.

Literature Becomes The Living Memory Of A Nation.

... People Don't Know What They Are Striving For. They Waste Themselves In Senseless Thrashing Around For The Sake Of A Handful Of Goods And Die Without Realizing Their Spiritual Wealth.

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?

It Was Wrong To Be Too Pragmatic, To Judge People Solely By Results; It Was More Humane To Judge By Intentions.

The Universe Has As Many Different Centers As There Are Living Beings In It.

Not Everything Has A Name. Some Things Lead Us Into A Realm Beyond Words…by Means Of Art Were Are Sometimes Sent - Dimly, Briefly - Revelations Unattainable By Reason.

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.

Own Only What You Can Always Carry With You: Know Languages, Know Countries, Know People. Let Your Memory Be Your Travel Bag.

Let Us Not Forget That Violence Does Not Live Alone And Is Not Capable Of Living Alone: It Is Necessarily Interwoven With Falsehood. Between Them Lies The Most Intimate, The Deepest Of Natural Bonds. Violence Finds Its Only Refuge In Falsehood, Falsehood Its Only Support In Violence. Any Man Who Has Once Acclaimed Violence As His Method Must Inexorably Choose Falsehood As His Principle.

Happiness Doesn't Depend On The Actual Number Of Blessings We Manage To Scratch From Life, Only Our Attitude Towards Them.

The Revolution Is An Amalgam Of Former Party Functionaries, Quasi- Democrats, Kgb Officers, And Black-market Wheeler-dealers, Who Are Standing In Power Now And Have Represented A Dirty Hybrid Unseen In World History

Only The First Swath Cut By The Scythe Is Difficult.

I Had Grown Up Among Engineers, And I Could Remember The Engineers Of The Twenties Very Well Indeed: Their Open, Shining Intellects, Their Free And Gentle Humor, Their Agility And Breadth Of Thought, The Ease With Which They Shifted From One Engineering Field To Another, And, For That Matter, From Technology To Social Concerns And Art. Then, Too, They Personified Good Manners And Delicacy Of Taste; Well-bred Speech That Flowed Evenly And Was Free Of Uncultured Words; One Of Them Might Play A Musical Instrument, Another Dabble In Painting; And Their Faces Always Bore A Spiritual Imprint.

An Opposition Is Necessary And Desirable For The Healthy Development Of Any Country. You Can Scarcely Find Anyone In Opposition, Except For The Communists, Just Like In Yeltsin's Times. It Is Regrettable That There Is Still No Constructive, Clear And Large-scale Opposition In Russia. The Growth And Development Of An Opposition, As Well As The Maturing Of Other Democratic Institutions, Will Take More Time And Experience.

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.

There Can Be No Acceptable Future Without An Honest Analysis Of The Past.

But What Can You Say In A Letter?

To His And Everybody Else's Way Of Thinking, You Should Build A House With Your Own Hands Before You Start Talking About Being An Engineer.

Any Man Who Has Once Proclaimed Violence As His Method Is Inevitably Forced To Take The Lie As His Principle.

In Our Country They Do Not Permit Any Information To Be X-rayed Through And Through, Nor Any Discussion To Encompass All The Facets Of A Subject. All This Is Invariably Suppressed At The Very Beginning, So No Ray Of Light Should Fall On The Naked Body Of Truth. And Then All This Is Piled Up In One Formless Heap Covering Many Years, Where It Languishes For Whole Decades, Until All Interest And All Means Of Sorting Out The Rusty Blocks From All This Trash Are Lost.

To 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.

I Insist On Believing That Beauty Elevates Human Beings.

A Genius Doesn't Adjust His Treatment Of A Theme To A Tyrant's Taste

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.

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.

I Think The Gap Between Rich And Poor Is An Extremely Dangerous Phenomenon And Needs The Immediate Attention Of The State.

If We Don't Know Our Own History, Then We Simply Will Have To Endure All Of The Same Mistakes, All Of The Same Sacrifices, All Of The Same Absurdities Over Again - Times Ten.

Like A Bicycle, Like A Wheel That, Once Rolling, Is Stable Only So Long As It Keeps Moving But Falls When Its Momentum Stops, So The Game Between A Man And Woman, Once Begun, Can Exist Only So Long As It Progresses. If The Forward Movement Today Is No More Than It Was Yesterday, The Game Is Over.

When I Was In The Gulag I Would Sometimes Even Write On Stone Walls. I Used To Write On Scraps Of Paper, Then I Memorised The Contents And Destroyed The Scraps.

When 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.

It's Not The Sea That Drowns You-it's The Puddle.

No One Can Bar The Road To Truth, And To Advance Its Cause I Am Prepared To Accept Even Death.

Violence Does Not And Cannot Flourish By Itself; It Is Inevitably Intertwined With Lying.

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.

The Earlier, The More Fun. Why Put It Off? It’s The Atomic Age!

... Once You Get Up Steam, You Are Carried Helplessly Along.

A Great Writer Is, So To Speak, A Secret Government In His Country

Literature Cannot Develop Between The Categories "permitted"—"not Permitted"—"this You Can And That You Can't." Literature That Is Not The Air Of Its Contemporary Society, That Dares Not Warn In Time Against Threatening Moral And Social Dangers, Such Literature Does Not Deserve The Name Of Literature; It Is Only A Facade. Such Literature Loses The Confidence Of Its Own People, And Its Published Works Are Used As Waste Paper Instead Of Being Read. -letter To The Fourth National Congress Of Soviet Writers

Economic Growth Is Not Only Unncessary, But Ruinous.

Still, Everybody Wants To Eat.

Gorbachev's Administration Was Amazingly Politically Naïve, Inexperienced And Irresponsible Towards The Country. It Was Not Governance But A Thoughtless Renunciation Of Power. The Admiration Of The West In Return Only Strengthened His Conviction That His Approach Was Right. But Let Us Be Clear That It Was Mikhail Gorbachev, And Not Boris Yeltsin, As Is Now Widely Being Claimed, Who First Gave Freedom Of Speech And Movement To The Citizens Of Russia.

Freedom Of Speech

Your Friend Will Argue With You.

There Is No Point Asserting And Reasserting What The Heart Cannot Believe.

I Am Deeply Convinced That God Is Present Both In The Lives Of Every Person And Also In The Lives Of Entire Nations.

The Foundation Stones Of A Great Building Are Destined To Groan And Be Pressed Upon; It Is Not For Them To Crown The Edifice.

We Particularly Like People Who Value Us Highly.

When We Feel That We Are Not Sufficiently Respected, We Should Ask Ourselves Whether We Are Living As We Should.

A Human Being Is All Hope And Impatience.

Voting 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.

We Have Arrived At An Intellectual Chaos.

The Heart Senses Who Is Friend And Who Is No Friend.

Communism Will Never Be Halted By Negotiations Or Through The Machinations Of Detente. It Can Only Be Halted By Force From Without Or By Disintegration From Within.

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.

A Forest Doesn't Weep Over One Tree.

... Mutual Lack Of Understanding Carries The Threat Of Imminent And Violent Destruction.

Even If We Are Spared Destruction By War, Our Lives Will Have To Change If We Want To Save Life From Self-destruction.

Power Is A Poison Well Known For Thousands Of Years. If Only No One Were Ever To Acquire Material Power Over Others! But To The Human Being Who Has Faith In Some Force That Holds Dominion Over All Of Us, And Who Is Therefore Conscious Of His Own Limitations, Power Is Not Necessarily Fatal. For Those, However, Who Are Unaware Of Any Higher Sphere, It Is A Deadly Poison. For Them There Is No Antidote.

There Is Something Predetermined In The Mutual Attraction Between Germany And Russia. Otherwise, This Attraction Would Not Have Survived Two Ghastly World Wars.

Mutual Attraction

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