Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

Murder begins where self-defense ends.

There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

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

Under no stretch of imagination can war be regarded as an ethical process; yet war, force, terror, and propaganda were the evolutionary means employed to weld the German people into a tribal whole.

If I do not respond to some situation, my conscience kills me. I believe in permissible violence, not necessarily non-violence.

Every person I killed I strongly believe that they were bad. When I do go face God there is going to be lots of things I will have to account for but killing any of those people is not one of them.

I'm a crack shot and I've won medals for shooting. But I don't think I could shoot a person.

People who don't believe in God may have their own way of justifying some bad act they have committed.

When you join the CIA, you have to make some peace with whether you are comfortable psychologically and philosophically, with the use of force and using it clandestinely.

Nothing will justify the killing of innocent people.

Murder is not absolved of immortality by committing murder. Murder is absolved of immorality by bringing men to think that murder is not evil. This only the perversion of the mind can bring about. And the perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defense are silent.

The essential effect of war on a citizen's conscience is nothing but a legalization and glorification of things that in times of peace constitute crime.

In order for non-violence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.

If you disapprove of violence, then you can't think there is any age when violence is appropriate.

Man without conscience is wilder and more dangerous than any beast.

Conscience is the spiritual, supernatural principle in man, and it is not of social origin at all. It is rather the perversion and confusion of conscience that is of social origin.

We satisfy our endless needs and justify our bloody deeds in the name of destiny and in the name of God.

If once we admit, be it for a single hour or in a single instance, that there can be anything more important than compassion for a fellow human being, then there is no crime against man that we cannot commit with an easy conscience.

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.

Guilt is a spiritual Rubicon.

Murder is only killing in the wrong place.

It might or might not be right to kill, but sometimes it is necessary.

In my religion I really cannot think of cases where violence is justified.

Conscience is the moralized form of self-absorption.