HB Alexander Solzhenitsyn 11 Dec 1918

Bless you, prison, for having been in my life. The meaning of earthly existence lies, not as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul. -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)

Five decades? Six? Seven? How long should it take to understand that the life of a community cannot be reduced to politics or wholly encompassed by government? The time in which we live has unfathomable depths beneath it. Our age is a mere film on the surface of time. --Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, _November 1916_

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

Our envy of others devours us most of all. - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
I'd rather the United States be the world's policeman than the Soviet Union be the world's jailer.-- Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I willtell 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. Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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? - Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

Call no day happy til it is done; call no man happy til he is dead. -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, _The Oak and the Calf_

At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church--none of them has been able to stop it. And don't succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state's essential functions. ... War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from evil. ... In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses--but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction--and that is war. --"Father Severyan", in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's _November 1916_

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

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good... Ideology - that is what gives devildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

God of the Universe! I believe again! Though I renounced You, You were with me! = A Solzhenitsyn

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I willtell 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. Alexander Solzhenitsyn