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In our age, when technology is gaining control over life, when material well-being is considered the most important goal, when the influence of religion has been weakened everywhere in the world, a special responsibility lies upon the writer.

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
Important
Responsibility
Material
Writing
Goal
Materials
Life
Age
Lies
World
Lying
Writer
Upon
Influence
Weakened
Religion
Technology
Gaining
Wells
Control
Considered
Well
Special
Everywhere

More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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We have to condemn the very idea that some people have the right to repress others.
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European democracy was originally imbued with a sense of Christian responsibility and self-discipline, but these spiritual principles have been gradually losing their force. Spiritual independence is being pressured on all sides by the dictatorship of self-satisfied vulgarity, of the latest fads, and of group interests.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide process, with East and West yielding the same results, and once again for the same reason: Men have forgotten God.
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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Freedom or prison--what's the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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If we don't know our own history, then we simply will have to endure all of the same mistakes, all of the same sacrifices, all of the same absurdities over again - times ten.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Surely people should eventually cease to be surprised at anything? And yet they continue to be.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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I think the gap between rich and poor is an extremely dangerous phenomenon and needs the immediate attention of the state.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The one who doesn't pull his weight is not asked to pull, while the one who does, pulls for two.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Which of us can control his feelings?
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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Like a bicycle, like a wheel that, once rolling, is stable only so long as it keeps moving but falls when its momentum stops, so the game between a man and woman, once begun, can exist only so long as it progresses. If the forward movement today is no more than it was yesterday, the game is over.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Evil people always support each other that is their chief strength.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble - and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The most intense patriotism always flourishes in the rear.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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History is too slow for our life, for our hearts.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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...it's only on a black day that you begin to have friends.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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... but food eaten quickly isn't food.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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... that maxim of Descartes: Question everything! Question everything!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn