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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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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
Evil
Firsts
Human
Humans
First
Must
Believe
Good
Integrity
More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It is not our level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes lie within our power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Shall I describe the happiness it gave me to go into the classroom and pick up the chalk? ... It seemed to me the supreme, heartbreaking happiness to enter a classroom carrying a register as that bell rang, and start a lesson with the mysterious air of one about to unfold wonders.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
All classifications in this world lack sharp boundaries, and all transitions are gradual.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men had forgotten God that is why all this has happened.'
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
To taste the sea all one needs is one gulp.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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
We should clearly understand that only the voluntary and conscientious acceptance by a people of its guilt can ensure the healing of a nation. Unremitting reproaches from outside are counterproductive.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Scientific research? Only when not at the cost of ethics-and first of all, those of the researchers themselves.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Why can't you understand? The stars fall down now and then. The gaps have to be filled.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The essence of life will never be captured by even the greatest of formulas.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
If a person can build a fence around himself, he is bound to do it.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Some are bound to die young. By dying young a person stays young in people's memory. If he burns brightly before he dies, his brightness shines for all time.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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
I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
That which is called humanism, but what would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of our life
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
... a man can safely sacrifice a great deal as long as he clings to the essential.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
What would things been like [in Russia] if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there, paling with terror at every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn