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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
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Writer
Upon
Influence
Weakened
Religion
Technology
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More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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I am deeply convinced that God is present both in the lives of every person and also in the lives of entire nations.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Why should I trust you? We haven't drunk from the same bowl of soup.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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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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When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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...skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.
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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To his and everybody else's way of thinking, you should build a house with your own hands before you start talking about being an engineer.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Who has the skill to make a narrow, obstinate human being aware of others' far-off grief and joy, to make him understand dimensions and delusions he himself has never lived through? Propaganda, coercion, and scientific proofs are powerless. But happily, in our world there is a way. It is art, and it is literature.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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During my time in the camps, I had got to know the enemies of the human race quite well: they respect the big fist and nothing else the harder you slug them, the safer you will be.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Human nature, if it changes at all, changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.
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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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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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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But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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If... if... We didn't love freedom enough. And even more - we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! ........... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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A human being is all hope and impatience.
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