Quote

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers . . . we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

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
Justice
Rise
Burying
Within
Surface
Reproach
Future
Integrity
Foundations
Evil
Silent
Punish
Spiritual
Foundation
Beneath
Neither
Appears
Evildoers
Generations
Keeping
Thousandfold
Deep
Sign
Ripping

More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
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The generation now coming out of Western schools is unable to distinguish good from bad. Even those words are unacceptable. This results in impaired thinking ability.
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I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write.
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Morality is always higher than law and we cannot forget this ever.
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It makes me happier, more secure, to think that I do not have to plan and manage everything for myself, that I am only a sword made sharp to smite the unclean forces, an enchanted sword to cleave and disperse them. Grant, O Lord, that I may not break as I strike! Let me not fall from Thy hand!
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Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.
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When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps.
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Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide process, with East and West yielding the same results, and once again for the same reason: Men have forgotten God.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word 'modernity' if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Of course, my views developed in the course of time. But I have always believed in what I did and never acted against my conscience.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Everyone is guilty of something or has something to conceal. All one has to do is look hard enough to find what it is.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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When Russia started to regain some of its strength as an economy and as a state, the West's reaction - perhaps a subconscious one, based on erstwhile fears - was panic.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Sometimes I feel quite distinctly that what is inside me is not all of me. There is something else, sublime, quite indestructible, some tiny fragment of the Universal spirit.Don't you feel that?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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A man used to riding in a car cannot understand a pedestrian.
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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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