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If you wanted to put the world to rights, who should you begin with: yourself or others?

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
Others
Wanted
World
Begin
Rights

More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask by whom has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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If one is a professional soldier, it is part of one's job to die sooner or later.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Nothing worthy can be built on a neglect of higher meanings and on a relativistic view of concepts and culture as a whole. Indeed, something greater than a phenomenon confined to art can be discerned shimmering here beneath the surface - shimmering not with light but with an ominous crimson glow.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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It's true that private enterprise is extremely flexible, But its only good within very narrow limits. If private enterprise isn't held in an iron grip it gives birth to people who are no better than beasts, those stock-exchange people with greedy appetites beyond restraint.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for-all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The same old caveman feeling-greed, envy, violence, and mutual hate, which along the way assumed respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial struggle, mass struggle, labor-union struggle-are tearing our world to pieces.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Who will dare say he has defined art?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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A fish does not campaign against fisheries-it only tries to slip through the mesh.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Why should I trust you? We haven't drunk from the same bowl of soup.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Work is what horses die of
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions its very complexity engenders art-and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, oversimplified explanations.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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We are so attached to the earth, and yet we are incapable of holding onto it.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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If... if... We didn't love freedom enough. And even more - we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! ........... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The Communists have for decades loudly proclaimed their goal of destroying the bourgeois world, while the West merely smiled at what seemed to be an extravagant joke.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn