Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order.

We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace.

Dictatorships start wars because they need external enemies to exert internal control over their own people.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

People almost never give up their freedoms — including, at times, the right to kill and impoverish one another — unless forced to do so; and virtually the only force strong enough to bring this about has been defeat in war or fear that such a defeat is imminent.

The spectacle which confronts all Europe today is a great conflict between democracy and dictatorship.

War and Authority are companions; Peace and Liberty are companions.

There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty - in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub - our immediate duty is to stop it.

Throughout history, government has proved to be the chief instrument for thwarting man's liberty.

I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression.

We all want peace. Unfortunately, there are times when peace must be defended by fighting terror and tyranny.

For all who love freedom and peace, the world without Saddam Hussein's regime is a better and safer place.

It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.

It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war.

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.

All that is needed to set us definitely on the road to a Fascist society is war. It will of course be a modified form of Fascism at first.

Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity, quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace.

Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

Government, which does not and did not grant us our rights, must not now seek to deny them by using fear as its justification.

Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party - though they are quite numerous - is no freedom at all.

A state that suppresses all freedom of speech, and which by imposing the most terrible punishments, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as plotting to high treason, is a state that breaks an unwritten law.

Most of wars or military coups or invasions are done in the name of democracy against democracy.

Fascism means war.