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Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Age: 89 †
Born: 1918
Born: December 11
Died: 2008
Died: January 1
Historian
Militant
Military Personnel
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Playwright
Poet
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Public Figure
School Teacher
Screenwriter
Writer
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Peace
Tyranny
War
Principle
Must
Method
Choose
Principles
Acclaimed
Violence
Inexorably
Politics
Antiwar
Lying
Falsehood
More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Even the most rational approach to ethics is defenseless if there isn't the will to do what is right.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I have always insisted on the need for local self-government for Russia, but I never opposed this model to Western democracy. On the contrary, I have tried to convince my fellow citizens by citing the examples of highly effective local self-government systems in Switzerland and New England, both of which I saw first-hand.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Your friend will argue with you.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
We have to condemn the very idea that some people have the right to repress others.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men had forgotten God that is why all this has happened.'
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Some are bound to die young. By dying young a person stays young in people's memory. If he burns brightly before he dies, his brightness shines for all time.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
What is the most precious thing in the world? I see now that it is the knowledge that you have no part in injustice. Injustice is stronger than you, it always was and always will be, but let it not be done through you.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person's mind begins to roam irretrievably. One's fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same with happiness, the very same...happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. There's a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: 'Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
... that maxim of Descartes: Question everything! Question everything!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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 our attention totally on it's pursuit. But even while it eludes us, the illusion of knowing it still lingers and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth seldom is pleasant it is almost invariably bitter.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
My wish for you... is that your skeptic-eclectic brain be flooded with the light of truth.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Beat a dog once and you only have to show him the whip.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
When you're young, you haven't the experience, when you're old you haven't the strength.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
You're sincere, but in order not to upset your views you avoid talking with people who think differently. You pick your thoughts from conversations with people like yourself, from books written by people like yourself. In physics they call it resonance. You start out with modest opinions, but they match and build each other up to a scale.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
