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A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.

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
Today
Striking
May
Observers
Feature
Decline
Features
West
Outside
Notices
Courage
Observer

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A leader should not be a man who arbitrarily imported his own ideas but the essential focal point for a group of people who trusted one another and worked for a common aim.
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I insist on believing that beauty elevates human beings.
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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.
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Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
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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?
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Call no day happy 'til it is done call no man happy til he is dead.
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Evil people always support each other that is their chief strength.
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A hard life improves the vision.
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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.
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I cannot suggest political ways out, that is the task of politicians, so it is simply that those who accuse me of this do not know how to read.
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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.
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Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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I would rather have the United States as the world's policeman than the Soviet Union as the world's jailer.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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If you want to change the world, who do you begin with, yourself or others? I believe if we begin with ourselves and do the things that we need to do and become the best person we can be, we have a much better chance of changing the world for the better.
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Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.
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.
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... scientists have made no clear effort to become an important, independently active force of mankind. Whole congresses at a time, they back away from the suffering of others it is more comfortable to stay within the bounds of science.
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It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!
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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.
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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