The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul.
The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. “One word of truth outweighs the world.
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.
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
In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars.
…it’s only on a black day that you begin to have friends.
Someone that you have deprived of everything is no longer in your power. He is once again entirely free.
Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.
All history is one continuous pestilence. There is no truth and there is no illusion. There is nowhere to appeal and nowhere to go.
Oh, how hard it is to part with power! This one has to understand.
Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.
If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?
Only a small crack … but cracks make caves collapse.
The earlier, the more fun. Why put it off? It’s the atomic age!
It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that “past” which “ought not to be stirred up.
in order to do evil, must first believe that what they are doing is good, otherwise they can’t do it.
You can build the Empire State Building. Train the Prussian army. Elevate the hierarchy of a totalitarian state higher than the throne of the Most High.But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own.
It’s an universal law– intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.
Shukhov ate his supper without bread–a double portion and bread on top of it would be too rich. So he’d save the bread. You get no thanks from your belly–it always forgets what you’ve just done for it and comes begging again the next day.
If a person can build a fence around himself, he is bound to do it.
Freedom meant one thing to him—home.But they wouldn’t let him go home.
And this man, who had sailed round Europe and navigated the Great Northern Route, leaned happily over half a ladleful of thin oatmeal kasha, cooked entirely without fat – just oats and water.
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.
Freedom or prison–what’s the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.
And we, from the whole of our life experience there, have concluded that there is only one way to withstand violence: with firmness.
Violence does not necessarily take people by the throat and strangle them. Usually it demands no more than an ultimate allegiance from its subjects. They are required merely to become accomplices in its lies.
Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
We always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.
Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.
All Communist Parties, upon attaining power, have become completely merciless. But at the stage before they achieve power, it is necessary to use disguises.
The Communist leaders respect only firmness and have contempt for persons who continually give in to them.
It is here that we see the dawn of hope: for no matter how formidably Communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what successes it attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity.
Work, he said, was a first-rate medicine for any illness.
A genius doesn’t adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant’s taste
The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
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.
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
It was clearly a prisoner’s craftwork; that is, the most painstaking work in the world, for prisoners have nowhere to hurry to.
The harder life is for a man when he is young, the easier it will be in the future.
The concept of maximum promotion of human rights to the expense of the majority of people in fact undermines the entire concept of the human community.
Thus it is that no cruelty whatsoever passes by without impact. Thus it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.
If one is forever cautious can one remain a human being?
For a country to have a great writer is to have another government.
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 biengs.
When you have robbed a man of everything he is no longer in your power. He is free again.
If one is forever cautious can one remain a human being?
Fools take to themselves the respect that is given to their office. Aesop It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
Talent is always conscious of its own abundance and does not object to sharing.
No one can bar the road to truth and to advance its cause I’m ready to accept even death.
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
The next war… may well bury Western civilization forever.
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.
Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.
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.
The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.
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.
The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.
Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.
Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
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.
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.
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.