Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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.

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

Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

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

The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.

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

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

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.

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.