Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

I just felt from personal observation that there is nothing more dislocated or alienated than a lifelong military person trying to cope in civilian life. It's like two completely separate planets.

Half of the time I don't know what they're talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language.

A government that cannot survive truth and must resort to stamping out truth is not a government that any country wants.

I prefer a little free speech to no free speech at all; but how many have free speech or the chance or the mind for it; and is not free speech here as elsewhere clamped down on in ratio of its freedom and danger?

It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind. We need to protect artists and journalists people to allow them to work.

Guilt was never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion.

The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.

If I felt like a fish out of water in my family, I felt like a fish on Mars in Adam’s circle.

Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly... perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness--the ache of the uprooted plant.

All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.

Both John F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela use the same three-word phrase which in my mind says it all, which is ‘Freedom is indivisible. You can’t slice it up, otherwise it ceases to be freedom. You can dislike Charlie Hebdo … but the fact that you dislike them has nothing to do with their right to speak.

I have always defined political correctness as an elevation of sensitivity over truth.

Whate'er the talents, or howe'er designed, We hang one jingling padlock on the mind.

there they laugh: they do not understand me; I am not the mouth for these ears.

A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind.

Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.

If it come to prohibiting, there is aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself.

There are some days when no matter what I say it feels like I'm far away in another country & whoever is doing the translating has had far too much to drink.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions.

I know that DER SPIEGEL is a respected magazine. But I don't know whether it is possible for you to publish the truth about the Holocaust. Are you permitted to write everything about it?

The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation.

In a free society we're supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it.

All persecution is a sign of fear; for if we did not fear the power of an opinion different from our own, we should not mind others holding it.

A letter is a risky thing; the writer gambles on the reader's frame of mind.

The thing that hurts, that became anger, was when I realized that if you tell the truth, in a country that says you’re entitled to tell the truth, you get your face slapped and you get put out of work.