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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

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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
Comfortable
Vision
Seeing
Difficult
Truth
Glance
Glances
Visible
Integrity

More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Beat a dog once and you only have to show him the whip.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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It is the artist who realizes that there is a supreme force above him and works gladly away as a small apprentice under God's heaven.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others... When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers ... we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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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
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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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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A storm breaks trees. It only bends grass.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Which of us can control his feelings?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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It is almost always impossible to evaluate at the time events which you have already experienced, and to understand their meaning with the guidance of their effects. All the more unpredictable and surprising to us will be the course of future events.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that past which ought not to be stirred up.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Education doesn't make you smarter.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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An engineer cannot participate in irrationality.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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To coexist with communism on the same planet is impossible. Either it will spread, cancer-like, to destroy mankind, or else mankind will have to rid itself of communism (and even then face lengthy treatment for secondary tumors).
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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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
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Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the neccessary steadfastness and determination... Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Scientific research? Only when not at the cost of ethics-and first of all, those of the researchers themselves.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn