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If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?

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
Prosaist
Public Figure
School Teacher
Screenwriter
Writer
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Cautious
Gambling
Remain
Forever
Action
Human
Humans

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Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme.
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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.
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Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig.
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A great number of publications and movies on the history of the 20th century - albeit of uneven quality - are evidence of a growing demand. Quite recently, the state-owned TV channel 'Russia' aired a series based on Varlam Shalamov's works, showing the terrible, cruel truth about Stalin's camps. It was not watered down.
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The revolution is an amalgam of former Party functionaries, quasi- democrats, KGB officers, and black-market wheeler-dealers, who are standing in power now and have represented a dirty hybrid unseen in world history
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I am deeply convinced that God is present both in the lives of every person and also in the lives of entire nations.
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I will tell you something else: it is a major responsibility not only of portraiture but of all human communication for each of us to help everyone else discover the best that is in him.
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The task of the artist is to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and the outrage of what man has done to it, and poignantly to let people know.
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A poet cannot be a Party member ... without paying the price.
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To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good.
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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.
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I have grown used to the fact that public repentance is the most unacceptable option for the modern politician.
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First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.
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If we don't know our own history, then we simply will have to endure all of the same mistakes, all of the same sacrifices, all of the same absurdities over again - times ten.
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We always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.
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A horrible human toll the Russian Orthodox Church suffered throughout almost the entire 20th century. The Church is just rising from its knees. Our young post-Soviet state is just learning to respect the Church as an independent institution.
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The essence of life will never be captured by even the greatest of formulas.
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It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
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Cracks make caves collapse.
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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