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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

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A horrible human toll the Russian Orthodox Church suffered throughout almost the entire 20th century. The Church is just rising from its knees. Our young post-Soviet state is just learning to respect the Church as an independent institution.
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There can be no acceptable future without an honest analysis of the past.
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Surely people should eventually cease to be surprised at anything? And yet they continue to be.
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You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power - he's free again.
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A man used to riding in a car cannot understand a pedestrian.
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What a force is laughter.
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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 can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.
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But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own.
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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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There is a law of time, a law of oblivion: glory to the dead life to the living.
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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.
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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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It's true that private enterprise is extremely flexible, But its only good within very narrow limits. If private enterprise isn't held in an iron grip it gives birth to people who are no better than beasts, those stock-exchange people with greedy appetites beyond restraint.
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The generation now coming out of Western schools is unable to distinguish good from bad. Even those words are unacceptable. This results in impaired thinking ability.
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Prayers are like those appeals of ours. Either they don't get through or they're returned with 'rejected' scrawled across 'em.
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