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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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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
Something
Solutions
Contradictions
Full
Linear
Simple
Flat
Oversimplified
Art
Flats
Formulations
Nature
Contradiction
Engenders
Human
Complexity
Riddles
Humans
Explanation
Explanations
Mean
Search
Riddle

More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology. The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point.
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Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.
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.
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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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Which of us can control his feelings?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Generosity is a two-edged virtue for an artist - it nourishes his imagination but has a fatal effect on his routine.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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... mutual lack of understanding carries the threat of imminent and violent destruction.
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
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The simple act of an ordinary courageous man is not to take part, not to support lies! Let that come into the world and even reign over it, but not through me. Writers and artists can do more: they can vanquish lies! ... Lies can stand up against much in the world, but not against art.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The central government possesses no plan of finding the way out of this blind alley.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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In every life there is one particular event that is decisive for the entire person-for his fate, his convictions, his passions.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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We are all human, and our senses are quicker to prompt us than our reason. Every man gives off a scent, and that scent tells you how to act before your head does.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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... once you get up steam, you are carried helplessly along.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Happiness doesn't depend on the actual number of blessings we manage to scratch from life, only our attitude towards them.
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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I cannot suggest political ways out, that is the task of politicians, so it is simply that those who accuse me of this do not know how to read.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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One can build the Empire State Building, discipline the Prussian army, make a state hierarchy mightier than God, yet fail to overcome the unaccountable superiority of certain human beings.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn