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Only a magician can fix a head on a body, but any fool can lop it off.

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
Head
War
Body
Magician
Fool

More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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On our crowded planet there are no longer any internal affairs!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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I was always optimistic. And I held to and was guided by my views.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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What a force is laughter.
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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Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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After all, man is a complicated being, why should he be explainable by logic?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Voting for impersonal parties and their programmes is a false substitute for the only true way to elect people's representatives: voting by an actual person for an actual candidate.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The term national idea is an unclear one. One might think of it as a widely shared understanding among a people as to the desired way of life in their country, an idea that holds sway over the population. A unifying concept like that can be useful, but should never be created artificially or imposed top-down by the powers-that-be.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that past which ought not to be stirred up.
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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Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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One drop of truth can outweigh an ocean of lies
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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The most intense patriotism always flourishes in the rear.
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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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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I have always insisted on the need for local self-government for Russia, but I never opposed this model to Western democracy. On the contrary, I have tried to convince my fellow citizens by citing the examples of highly effective local self-government systems in Switzerland and New England, both of which I saw first-hand.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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If we look far into the future, one can see a time in the 21st century when both Europe and the USA will be in dire need of Russia as an ally.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against freedom of print, it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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My wish for you... is that your skeptic-eclectic brain be flooded with the light of truth.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn