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One can build the Empire State Building, discipline the Prussian army, make a state hierarchy mightier than God, yet fail to overcome the unaccountable superiority of certain human beings.

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
Failing
Overcome
Building
Overcoming
Prussian
State
Fail
Unaccountable
Certain
Greatness
Mightier
States
Army
Hierarchy
Human
Build
Empire
Humans
Discipline
Superiority
Make
Beings
Empires

More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.
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Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same with happiness, the very same...happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. There's a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: 'Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
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I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Was it Gorky who had said, If your children are no better than you are, you have fathered them in vain, indeed you have lived in vain.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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If there were no executioners, there would be no executions.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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A storm breaks trees. It only bends grass.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Oh, how hard it is to part with power! This one has to understand.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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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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Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage . . . . Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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On our crowded planet there are no longer any internal affairs!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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... once you get up steam, you are carried helplessly along.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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You get no thanks from your belly-it always forgets what you've just done for it and comes begging again the next day.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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All classifications in this world lack sharp boundaries, and all transitions are gradual.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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If one is a professional soldier, it is part of one's job to die sooner or later.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The simple act of an ordinary courageous man is not to take part, not to support lies! Let that come into the world and even reign over it, but not through me. Writers and artists can do more: they can vanquish lies! ... Lies can stand up against much in the world, but not against art.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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A great number of publications and movies on the history of the 20th century - albeit of uneven quality - are evidence of a growing demand. Quite recently, the state-owned TV channel 'Russia' aired a series based on Varlam Shalamov's works, showing the terrible, cruel truth about Stalin's camps. It was not watered down.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn