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... We brush aside all scales not our own, as if they were follies or delusions.

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
Delusion
Aside
Scales
Folly
Judgment
Follies
Delusions
Brush
Brushes

More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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A whole week, a single campaign, a month, a week, even a day was far more than enough to cut a company or platoon to ribbons or cripple a man for life: it needed only a quarter of an hour.
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We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.
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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.
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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.
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To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The earlier, the more fun. Why put it off? It’s the atomic age!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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There can be no acceptable future without an honest analysis of the past.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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We have been fortunate enough to live at a time when virtue, though it does not triumph, is nonetheless not always tormented by attack dogs. Beaten down, sickly, virtue has now been allowed to enter in all its tatters and sit in the corner, as long as it doesn't raise its voice.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it - from The Gulag Archipelago
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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We hear a constant clamor for rights, rights, always rights, but so very little about responsibility. And we have forgotten God. The need now is for selflessness, for a spirit of sacrifice, for a willingness to put aside personal gains for the salvation of the whole Western world.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The less you speak, the more you will hear.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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What would things been like [in Russia] if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there, paling with terror at every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes a person's noblest impulses.
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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We never know beforehand how new posts or new work will change us.
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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To reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. Such a rejection is more than a political act. It is a protest of our souls against those who would have us forget the concepts of good and evil.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person's mind begins to roam irretrievably. One's fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us...than the need for any external expansion of our power.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn