Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.

Even the most rational approach to ethics is defenseless if there isn't the will to do what is right.

If you want to change the world, who do you begin with, yourself or others? I believe if we begin with ourselves and do the things that we need to do and become the best person we can be, we have a much better chance of changing the world for the better.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction.

It is not our level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes lie within our power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.

If you live in a graveyard, you can't weep for everyone.

Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday. Look around you - there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn't make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you'll hear.

We always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.

I leaf through the ancient philosophers and find my newest discoveries there.

If state, party and social policy will not be based on morality, then mankind has no future to speak of.

Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.

Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same with happiness, the very same...happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. There's a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: 'Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied.

...skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.

Yes, you live with your feet in the mud and there's no time to be thinking about how you got in or how you're going to get out.

Work was like a stick. It had two ends. When you worked for the knowing you gave them quality; when you worked for a fool you simply gave him eyewash.

My wish for you... is that your skeptic-eclectic brain be flooded with the light of truth.

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

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.

There is no point asserting and reasserting what the heart cannot believe.

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...