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

More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.
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There is something predetermined in the mutual attraction between Germany and Russia. Otherwise, this attraction would not have survived two ghastly World Wars.
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Friends! Let us try to help if we are worth anything at all!
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Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one's well-being.
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I have grown used to the fact that public repentance is the most unacceptable option for the modern politician.
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I was always optimistic. And I held to and was guided by my views.
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If someone asked you, why not help him out?
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When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. Admittedly, this was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by the natural disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.
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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.
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Violence does not and cannot flourish by itself it is inevitably intertwined with lying.
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An engineer cannot participate in irrationality.
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...skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.
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The revolution is an amalgam of former Party functionaries, quasi- democrats, KGB officers, and black-market wheeler-dealers, who are standing in power now and have represented a dirty hybrid unseen in world history
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Every act of perception has an emotional coloring.
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To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Of course, my views developed in the course of time. But I have always believed in what I did and never acted against my conscience.
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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.
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You're sincere, but in order not to upset your views you avoid talking with people who think differently. You pick your thoughts from conversations with people like yourself, from books written by people like yourself. In physics they call it resonance. You start out with modest opinions, but they match and build each other up to a scale.
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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.
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Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
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