Frasi di Alexandr Isajevič Solženicyn

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“Nella vita sociale, libertà e uguaglianza tendono a escludersi reciprocamente, sono antagoniste: infatti, la libertà distrugge l'uguaglianza sociale, è proprio questa una della funzioni della libertà, mentre l'uguaglianza limita la libertà, perché diversamente non vi si potrebbe giungere.”

“Lo scopo della vita è la maturazione dell'anima. Non rincorrere quello che è illusorio, come la proprietà o la posizione. Tutte cose che vengono ottenute a spese dei nervi, decennio dopo decennio, e sono confiscate nella notte della caduta.”

“Non date la caccia all'illusorio, agli averi, al titolo: questi si acquistano con il logorio nervoso di decenni e sono confiscati in una notte. Fate vostra una continua superiorità nei riguardi della vita, non abbiate paura delle sciagure, non languite nell'attesa della felicità: l'amarezza non durerà per sempre, la dolcezza non sarà mai piena.”

“Bisogna saper migliorare con pazienza quanto ogni giorno ci offre.”

“Si può avere potere sulle persone finché non gli si porta via qualcosa. Ma quando si è rubato tutto ad uomo, questi non sarà più soggetto ad alcun potere: sarà libero di nuovo.”

“Se da una parte ci fossero uomini neri che tramano malignamente opere nere e bastasse distinguerli dagli altri e distruggerli! Ma la linea che separa il bene dal male attra versa il cuore di ognuno. Chi distruggerebbe un pezzo del proprio cuore?”

“I prigionieri, tra gli uomini, sono quelli che più soffrono il freddo, più di qualunque altra cosa.”

“Un uomo d'ingegno sa di possedere sempre molto, non si rammarica di dover dividere con altri.”

“Gli unici sostituti di una esperienza che non abbiamo mai vissuto in prima persona sono l’arte e la letteratura.”

“Possiedi solo ciò che puoi portare con te; conosci le lingue, conosci i paesi, conosci la gente. Lascia che la tua memoria sia la tua sacca da viaggio.”

“Alla fine della mia vita posso sperare che il materiale storico i temi storici, i quadri di vita e i personaggi da me raccolti e presentati, riguardanti gli anni durissimi e torbidi vissuti dal nostro Paese, entreranno nella coscienza e nella memoria dei miei connazionali […]. La nostra amara esperienza nazionale ci aiuterà nella possibile nuova ripresa delle nostre mutevoli fortune, ci metterà in guardia e ci terrà lontani da rovinose rotture.”

“C'è una parola che si usa molto oggi: "anticomunismo". È una parola molto stupida e mal composta perché dà l'impressione che il comunismo sia qualche cosa di primitivo, di basico, di fondamentale. E così, prendendolo come punto di partenza, anticomunismo è definito in relazione a comunismo. Per questo affermo che la parola è stata mal scelta e fu composta da gente che non conosceva l'etimologia: il concetto primario, eterno, è Umanità. Ed il comunismo è anti-Umanità. Chi dice "anti-comunismo", in realtà sta dicendo anti-anti-Umanità. Un costrutto molto misero. Sarebbe come dire: ciò che è contro il comunismo è a favore dell'Umanità. Non accettare, rifiutare questa ideologia comunista, inumana, è semplicemente essere un essere umano. Non è essere membro di un partito.”

“Questa antica triunità della Verità, del Bene e della Bellezza non è semplicemente una caduca formula da parata, come ci era sembrato ai tempi della nostra presuntuosa giovinezza materialistica. Se, come dicevano i sapienti, le cime di questi tre alberi si riuniscono, mentre i germogli della Verità e del Bene, troppo precoci e indifesi, vengono schiacciati, strappati e non giungono a maturazione, forse strani, imprevisti, inattesi saranno i germogli della Bellezza a spuntare e crescere nello stesso posto e saranno loro in tal modo a compiere il lavoro per tutti e tre.”

“Sarebbe assolutamente vano sperare che la rivoluzione possa rigenerare la natura umana.”

“Erano queste le nostre camere della morte. Ci mancava il gas per fare le camere a gas.”

“La Cecenia nelle sue frontiere nazionali vere va riconosciuta. Che sia indipendente se lo vuole.”

“A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste”

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

“… you are strong only as long as you don't deprive people of. For a person you've takenfrom us no longer in your power. He's free all over again.”

“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.”

“Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.”

“… it's only on a black day that you begin to have friends.”

“Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.”

“Oh, how hard it is to part with power! This one has to understand.”

“Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you — you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.”

“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.”

“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.”

“As the two-thousand-year-old saying goes, you can have eyes and still not see. But a hard life improves vision.”

“Violence can only be concealed by a Lie, & the Lie can only be maintained by Violence…. Any man, who has once proclaimed Violence as his Method, is inevitably forced to take the Lie as his Principle”

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

“We are all human, and our senses are quicker to prompt us than our reason. Every man gives off a scent, and that scent tells you how to act before your head does.”

“One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.”

“I was in a state of witless shock, as though flames had suddenly enwrapped and paralyzed me so that for a moment I had no mind, no memory.”

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

“Harvard's motto is "Veritas." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.”

“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but 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.”

“Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers — such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.”

“We shall be told: what can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? But 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.”

“What then is the place and role of the writer in this cruel, dynamic, split world on the brink of its ten destructions? After all we have nothing to do with letting off rockets, we do not even push the lowliest of hand-carts, we are quite scorned by those who respect only material power. Is it not natural for us too to step back, to lose faith in the steadfastness of goodness, in the indivisibility of truth, and to just impart to the world our bitter, detached observations: how mankind has become hopelessly corrupt, how men have degenerated, and how difficult it is for the few beautiful and refined souls to live amongst them?
But we have not even recourse to this flight. Anyone who has once taken up the WORD can never again evade it; a writer is not the detached judge of his compatriots and contemporaries, he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his native land or by his countrymen.”

“The clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble.”

“Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.”

“But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive, you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?”

“If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.”

“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.
Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by occasional outbursts and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments and with countries that lack support, or with doomed currents which clearly cannot offer resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.
Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”

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