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.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

For a country to have a great writer is to have another government.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

For me and my friends, for people who think the way I do over there, for all ordinary Soviet citizens, America evokes a mixture of admiration and compassion... You're a country of the future, a young country, with yet untapped possibilities, enormous territory, great breadth of spirit, generosity, magnanimity. But these qualities—strength, generosity, and magnanimity—are usually combined in a man and even in a whole country with trustfulness. And this has already done you a disservice several times.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Freedom meant one thing to him—home. But they wouldn't let him go home.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Freedom or prison--what's the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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 -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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 -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an uprooted small corner of

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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 -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an uprooted small corner of evil. (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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. One of these riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly appear to lose the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery. Or again: why is it that societies which have been benumbed for half a century by lies they have been forced to swallow find within themselves a certain lucidity of heart and soul which enables them to see things in their true perspective and to perceive the real meaning of events; whereas societies with access to every kind of information suddenly plunge into lethargy, into a kind of mass blindness, a kind of voluntary self-deception.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn