Quotes about being
page 4

“No sentimentality, comrade… The only good human being is a dead one.”

George Orwell book Animal Farm

Variant: The only good human being is a dead one.
Source: Animal Farm

Dead

“Sometimes, being true to yourself means changing your mind. Self changes, and you follow.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

Change

“The incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading" so that "he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.”

Viktor E. Frankl (1905–1997) Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor

Suffering

“There is not human being from whom we cannot learn something if we are interested enough to dig deep.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

Source: You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life

Learning

“What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes, if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far from it: at the same time he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Life, War, People, World

“Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

“I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life; I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Address in Des Moines, Iowa (4 November 1910)
1910s

Life, People, Envy

“To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not love.)”

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher

Love, Betrayal

“Beauty is about being comfortable in your own skin. It's about knowing and accepting who you are.”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

Source: Seriously... I'm Kidding

Beauty, Beauty

“You can live a whole life time never being awake.”

Dan Millman (1946) American self help writer

Source: Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives

Life, Time

“We have seen many rich persons, many powerful persons, many famous persons, many beautiful persons, many learned and scholarly persons, and persons in the renounced order of life unattached to material possessions. But we have never seen any one person who is unlimitedly and simultaneously wealthy, powerful, famous, beautiful, wise and unattached, like Kṛṣṇa, in the history of humanity. Kṛṣṇa, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, is a historical person who appeared on this earth 5,000 years ago. He stayed on this earth for 125 years and played exactly like a human being, but His activities were unparalleled. From the very moment of His appearance to the moment of His disappearance, every one of His activities is unparalleled in the history of the world, and therefore anyone who knows what we mean by Godhead will accept Kṛṣṇa as the Supreme Personality of Godhead. No one is equal to the Godhead, and no one is greater than Him. That is the import of the familiar saying “God is great.”

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977) Indian guru

Source: Krsna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead

Life, God, World, Beauty

“being a successful person is not necessarily defined by what you have achieved, but by what you have overcome.”

Fannie Flagg (1944) American actress, comedian and author

Source: The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion

Success, Personality, Sad, Wise

“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Reflections on Gandhi (1949)
Source: In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950

Love, Life, Perfection, Loyalty

“Human beings had two basic orientations: HAVING and BEING
HAVING: seeks to acquire, posses things even people
BEING: focuses on the experience; exchanging, engaging, sharing with other people”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

People

“I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.”

Osamu Dazai book No Longer Human

Source: No Longer Human

Life, Happiness, People

“Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. …Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? — Every, every minute?”

Thornton Wilder Our Town

"Emily Webb"
Our Town (1938)
Context: I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back — up the hill — to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by Grover's Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking... and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths... and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.... Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? — Every, every minute?... I'm ready to go back... I should have listened to you. That's all human beings are! Just blind people.

Life

“Only the right name gives beings and things their reality. A wrong name makes everything unreal. That's what lies do.”

Michael Ende book The Neverending Story

Source: The Neverending Story

Reality

“Happiness means being close to the one you love, that's all. (Taking immediate possession is not necessary.)”

Orhan Pamuk book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

Love, Happiness

“I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

“Believe me, I know what it's like to feel all alone… the worst kind of loneliness in the world is isolation that comes from being misunderstood, it can make people lose their grasp on reality. - Sienna Brooks”

Dan Brown book Inferno

Source: Inferno

People, World, Feeling, Reality

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Variant: If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

World, Funny

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Sense, Joy

“courage is being scared to death - and saddling up anyway"

"A goal, A love and A dream give you total control over your body and your life”

John Wayne (1907–1979) American film actor

Love, Life, Death, Dreams

“It's only a little secret, but having a secret makes me feel better. Like a human being again.”

Stephen King book Rage

Source: Rage

Secret, Feeling

“The pain of being alone is completely out of this world, isn't it? I don't know why, but I understand your feelings so much, it actually hurts.”

Masashi Kishimoto (1974) Japanese manga artist

Pain, World, Feeling, Understanding

“And always I have this feeling--which may not be true at all--that I am being used as a messenger.”

Jane Goodall (1934) British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist

Source: Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey

Feeling

“I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault (25 October 1982)

Love, Life, Books, Feeling

“You are in a partnership with all other human beings, not a contest to be judged better than some and worse than others.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

Partnership

“On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Source: All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

Time

“It's a very brave thing to fall in love. You have to be willing to trust somebody else with your whole being, and that's very difficult, really difficult and very brave.”

Nicole Kidman (1967) Australian-American actress and film producer

Love

“To sustain the belief that there is no God, atheism has to demonstrate infinite knowledge, which is tantamount to saying, “I have infinite knowledge that there is no being in existence with infinite knowledge”

Ravi Zacharias (1946) Indian philosopher

God, Knowledge

“I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Art, Way, Sense

“I walked around the block twice, passed 200 people and failed to see a human being.”

Charles Bukowski book Tales of Ordinary Madness

Source: Tales of Ordinary Madness

People

“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.”

Joan Robinson (1903–1983) English economist

Source: Contributions to Modern Economics (1978), Chapter 7, Marx, Marshall and Keynes, p. 75

Question, Study, Learning

“Even injustice has it's good points. It gives me the challenge of being as happy as I can in an unfair world.”

Albert Ellis (1913–2007) American psychologist

Happiness, World

“Is there a difference between happiness and inner peace? Yes. Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Happiness, Peace, Dependency

“it's your own fault for encouraging him…, you know. Now he thinks he's a human being.
Neal of Queens cove”

Tamora Pierce book Page

Source: Page

Thinking

“I shall pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

Henry Drummond (1851–1897) Scottish evangelist, writer and lecturer

Source: The Supreme Gift

World, Way

“You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody's crazy.”

Charles Manson (1934–2017) American criminal and musician

Interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C6K0umwZwo by Diane Sawyer (1994)

Time

“If you are not vegan, please consider going vegan. It’s a matter of nonviolence. Being vegan is your statement that you reject violence to other sentient beings, to yourself, and to the environment, on which all sentient beings depend.”

Gary L. Francione (1954) American legal scholar

Dependency

“Human beings are drawn to cats because they are all we are not — self-contained, elegant in everything they do, relaxed, assured, glad of company, yet still possessing secret lives.”

Pam Brown (1948) Australian poet

Secret, Cats

“If you want to make a difference, the next time you see someone being cruel to another human being, take it personally. Take it personally because it is personal!”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: I Thought It Was Just Me: Women Reclaiming Power and Courage in a Culture of Shame

Time, Personality

“And then many things became very clear… we learned perfectly that the life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on earth.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Life, Learning, Time

“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Age, Education, Idea, Indifference

“Picture the moment when your mom and dad first saw you as something other than a pretty, tiny version of them. You as them, but improved. Better educated. Innocent. Then picture when you stopped being their dream.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Rant

Source: Rant

Education, Dreams, Moms

“The point was to learn what it was we feared more: being misunderstood or being betrayed.”

Adam Levine (1979) singer, songwriter, actor, and record producer from the United States

Source: The Instructions

Fear, Learning

“Being brokenhearted is like having broken ribs. On the outside it looks like nothing's wrong, but every breath hurts.”

Greg Behrendt (1963) American comedian

Source: It's Called a Breakup Because It's Broken: The Smart Girl's Break-Up Buddy

Hurt, Hurtful

“Love me sweet
With all thou art
Feeling, thinking, seeing;
Love me in the Lightest part,
Love me in full Being.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) English poet, author

Love, Art, Feeling, Thinking

“Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.”

Denis Waitley (1933) American writer

Failure, Teachers, Dead

“When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else … you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

“Being with her I feel a pain, like a frozen knife stuck in my chest. An awful pain, but the funny thing is I'm thankful for it. It's like that frozen pain and my very existence are one.
The pain is an anchor, mooring me”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

Pain, Feeling

“You've got to learn to leave the table
When love's no longer being served".”

Nina Simone (1933–2003) American singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger, and civil rights activist

Love, Learning

“Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse--hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.”

George Orwell book Animal Farm

Source: Animal Farm

Life, Hunger, Law, Disappointment

“Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.”

Marilyn vos Savant (1946) US American magazine columnist, author and lecturer

As quoted in Perfectionism : What's Bad About Being Too Good? (1987) by Miriam Adderholdt and Jan Goldberg, p. 85

Good Morning

“The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.”

Mark Nepo (1951) American writer

Joy

“If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.”

James Herriot (1916–1995) veterinary surgeon and writer

Source: All Creatures Great and Small

Love, Feeling, Soul, Animals

“The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable.”

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) German-American theologian and philosopher

Courage

“Humans have come into being for the sake of each other, so either teach them, or learn to bear them.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

Learning

“To have a child is the greatest honor and responsibility that can be bestowed upon any living being.”

Christopher Paolini book Eragon

Source: Eragon

“Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Life, Change, Hurtful

“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Quoted by Alvin Redman in The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde http://books.google.com/books?id=qUjQAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Keep+love+in+your+heart+a+life+without+it+is+like+a+sunless+garden+when+the+flowers+are+dead+the+consciousness+of+loving+and+being+loved+brings+a+warmth+and+richness+to+life+that+nothing+else+can+bring%22&pg=PA102#v=onepage (1952)

Love, Life, Flowers, Heart

“Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.”

Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) Japanese author, Nobel Prize winner

Way, Time

“Every living being is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe. Though seemingly affected only by its immediate surrounding, the sphere of external influence extends to infinite distance.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

Universe

“I fear being like everyone I hate, I fear failure, I fear losing control. I love balancing between chaos and control with everything I do. I always have a fear of going one way or another, getting lost in something, or losing everything to get lost in. And I fear being a completely acceptable sheep in society.”

Marilyn Manson (1969) American rock musician and actor

Love, Hate, Fear, Way

“What is the point of being on this Earth if you are going to be like everyone else?”

Arnold Schwarzenegger book Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

Source: Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

“… just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.”

Guy Debord book The Society of the Spectacle

Source: The Society of the Spectacle

Appearance

“I'm awaiting a lover. I have to be rent and pulled apart and live according to the demons and the imagination in me. I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: Fire: From A Journal of Love - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

Imagination, Star, Lovers

“The secret to modeling is not being perfect. What one needs is a face that people can identify in a second. You have to be given what’s needed by nature, and what’s needed is to bring something new.”

Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019) German fashion designer

People, Secret, Nature, Perfection

“The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Feeling

“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

"The Threatened", The Book of Sand [El Libro de arena] (1975)

Way, Time, For Him, For Boyfriend

“The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Source: We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change

Education, Teachers

“Life, is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming”

Myrna Loy (1905–1993) American film, television and stage actress

Life

“As soon as something stops being fun, I think it’s time to move on. Life is too short to be unhappy. Waking up stressed and miserable is not a good way to live.”

Richard Branson (1950) English business magnate, investor and philanthropist

Source: Screw It, Let's Do It: Lessons In Life

Life, Way, Thinking, Time

“I have not lived as a woman. I have lived as a man. I've just done what I damn well wanted to, and I've made enough money to support myself, and ain't afraid of being alone.”

Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) film, stage, and television actress

Money, Support

“Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.”

Viktor E. Frankl book Man's Search for Meaning

Source: Man's Search for Meaning

Freedom, Change

“If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force.”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

Source: The Theater and Its Double

Life, Imagination

“This instinctive repulsion which tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the very rare consolations for being so impoverished which are given to those of us who don’t sell anything to anybody.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

Men, Feeling

“So at the end of this day, we give thanks
For being betrothed to the unknown.”

John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher

“That her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book Americanah

Source: Americanah

Housing

“Earning happiness means doing good and working, not speculating and being lazy. Laziness may look inviting, but only work gives you true satisfaction.”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

Happiness, Back To Work

“But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

“Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around.”

Richard Yates book Revolutionary Road

Source: Revolutionary Road

People

“And being different? That turned out to the best part of all. I found that with a little creativity, and a lot of dedication, any difference can be turned into something amazing. Our differences are our superpowers.”

Cece Bell book El Deafo

Source: El Deafo

Parting

“One learns more of Christ in being married and rearing children than in several lifetimes spent in study in a monastery.”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

Children, Study, Learning, Christ

“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.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Happiness, People, Feeling

“Omnipotence and foreknowledge of God, I repeat, utterly destroy the doctrine of 'free-will' … doubtless it gives the greatest possible offense to common sense or natural reason, that God, Who is proclaimed as being full of mercy and goodness, and so on, should of His own mere will abandon, harden and damn men, as though He delighted in the sins and great eternal torments of such poor wretches. It seems an iniquitous, cruel, intolerable thought to think of God; and it is this that has been such a stumbling block to so many great men down through the ages. And who would not stumble at it? I have stumbled at it myself more than once, down to the deepest pit of despair, so that I wished I had never been made a man. (That was before I knew how health-giving that despair was, and how close to grace”

Martin Luther book On the Bondage of the Will

Source: On the Bondage of the Will (1525), p. 217

Men, God, Health, Age

“Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for morality which human beings arbitrarily devise.”

Osamu Dazai book No Longer Human

Third Notebook: Part Two
No Longer Human

“I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric.”

Osamu Dazai book No Longer Human

The First Notebook
No Longer Human

Feeling, Confidence, Optimism, Perfection

“That's what I like about the World Series. It gives me a chance to talk with lots of writers, a chance for them to understand me better than in the past. When Roberto Clemente is mentioned, he is always mentioned with injuries. They say I'm moody, selfish, temperamental. That's not the real me. I was born with a serious face. If you know my life, if you know me well by taking the time to learn to know me, then you'll understand me. Most places I go, people say "smile." I don't like that. I don't believe in being a hypocrite. If the occasion is for smiling, I will be smiling. I'm a very happy person.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "Clemente Says He is Very Happy" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=42oeAAAAIBAJ&sjid=QckEAAAAIBAJ&pg=1983%2C4221206 by the Associated Press, in The Daytona Beach Morning Journal (October 16, 1971), p. 1-C <br class="br">Other, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1971</big>

Life, Happiness, People, World

“The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.”

Matka Tereza (1910–1997) Roman Catholic saint of Albanian origin

As quoted by Malcolm Muggeridge in Something Beautiful for God http://books.google.com/books?id=irO7hAQLmsMC&q=&quot;The+biggest+disease+today+is+not+leprosy+or+tuberculosis+but+rather+the+feeling+of+being+unwanted&quot;&pg=PA73#v=onepage (1971) <br class="br">1970s

Disease, Feeling

“The Law teaches that the universe was invented and created by God, and that it did not come into being by chance or by itself.”

Averroes book On the Harmony of Religions and Philosophy

Part 1: The Creation of the Universe; Opening sentence
On the Harmony of Religions and Philosophy

God, Law, Universe, Chance

“Human beings are the sort of creature who has to know what to do when they don't know what to do. That's very paradoxical, and what we do is we prepare to do everything. We're on guard, and we prepare to do everything. It's very very stressful, but also something that's very engaging. It's something that heightens consciousness.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

“Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.”

Golda Meir (1898–1978) former prime minister of Israel

On 30th anniversary of the founding of Israel, in International Herald Tribune (11 May 1978)

Problem, Thinking, Country

“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.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers’ Congress (16 May 1967) “The Struggle Intensifies,” Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, ed. Leopold Labedz (1970).

Pain, People, Fear, Confidence