Quotes by Russian/Russia authors (page 5)

"You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power - he's free again"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one's well-being"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word "modernity" if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Literature becomes the living memory of a nation"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"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, Author

"First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Author

"Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Novelist

"Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Novelist

"Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Novelist

"Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Novelist

"It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Novelist

"If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Novelist

"If there is no God, everything is permitted"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Novelist

"We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Novelist

"There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Novelist

"War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves"

Leo Tolstoy, Novelist

"To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it"

Leo Tolstoy, Novelist

"War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it"

Leo Tolstoy, Novelist

"If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one's reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state"

Leo Tolstoy, Novelist

"If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love"

Leo Tolstoy, Novelist

"Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them"

Leo Tolstoy, Novelist

"Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us"

Leo Tolstoy, Novelist

"Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live"

Leo Tolstoy, Novelist

"Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced"

Leo Tolstoy, Novelist

Page 5 of 33

Quotes by Russian authors