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... that maxim of Descartes: Question everything! Question everything!

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
Descartes
Maxim
Maxims
Question
Doubt
Everything

More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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The perception of the West as mostly a knight of democracy has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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A poet cannot be a Party member ... without paying the price.
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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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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A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!
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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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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But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society . . . loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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A storm breaks trees. It only bends grass.
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
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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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When I was young, the early death of my father cast a shadow over me - and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final, milestone of one's existence.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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What is the most precious thing in the world? I see now that it is the knowledge that you have no part in injustice. Injustice is stronger than you, it always was and always will be, but let it not be done through you.
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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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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I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn