A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy..., but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.
A fish does not campaign against fisheries, it only tries to slip through the mesh.
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny and reinforces it.
A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf.
And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions.
At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride[, but] it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies....
At times [a man] is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
But no one wept—no one. Hatred is dry-eyed
Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art.
Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.
Human nature, if it changes at all, changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth.
I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million [Russians], I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God…’
In its sharp protest against Catholicism, Protestantism [discarded] the mysterious, mythical, and mystical aspects of the faith. In that sense it has impoverished religion.
In taking vital decisions [prisoners] are guided by the well-known rule of the [Gulag]: It is better to be a son-of-a-bitch than to suffer.
In the struggle with falsehood art always did win, and it always does win!
It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.
It’s quite enough to show a well-beaten dog the whip.
Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day.
Let falsehood enter the world, let it even reign in the world--but not with my help.
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.
Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher….
Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig.
Should one point out that, from ancient times, decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?
Socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion.
Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.
Socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, bureaucratic greed, corruption, and avarice....
The disappearance of nations would impoverish us no less than if all peoples were made alike, with one character, one face.
The hunger strike is a purely moral weapon. It presupposes that the jailer has not entirely lost his conscience. Or that the jailer is afraid of public opinion.
The innermost core of our being is religion, not party ideology.
The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
The most intense patriotism always flourishes in the rear.
The nation [without a free press] ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and...compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another.
The price of cowardice will only be evil; we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.
The quickest louse is first on the nit comb.
The western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, [and] in each political party....
The young...are jubilantly repeating our depraved Russian blunders..., under the impression that they are discovering something new.
There are no internal affairs left on our crowded Earth!... Mankind's sole salvation lies in everyone making everything his business.
To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.
To pardon a thief is to kill a good man.
Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive.
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.
When spiritual death creeps through the land like poison gas, the school and its pupils are of course among the first to suffocate.
When you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power--he’s free again.
Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power…. It is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory.
Works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force--they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.
[Violence] does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat. More often it demands from its subjects only...complicity in falsehood.
[Works of art] which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one.