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Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble - and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

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
Short
Lambs
Strength
Corpses
Evildoers
Imagination
Justification
Iago
Spiritual
Shakespeare
Justifications
Littles
Dozen
Macbeth
Little
Ideology
Devoured
Self
Stopped
Lamb
Even
Conscience
Feeble

More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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You know the words from the Bible: 'Build not on sand, but on rock....' Tyrant leaders respect only firmness...and laugh at persons who give in to them.
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The earlier, the more fun. Why put it off? It’s the atomic age!
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Lord, give me the strength to accomplish what You've given me to do and the faith to trust You that what I haven't been able to accomplish You've already assigned to someone else.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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To his and everybody else's way of thinking, you should build a house with your own hands before you start talking about being an engineer.
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This is a grave danger: the stoppage of information between the parts of the planet. Contemporary science knows that such stoppage is the way of entropy, of universal destruction.
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If there were no executioners, there would be no executions.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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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
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A fish does not campaign against fisheries-it only tries to slip through the mesh.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Any fool can bomb a train, but just try sorting out the mess.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Justness exists, even if few people exist who feel it.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The one who pulls is the one they urge on.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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My wish for you... is that your skeptic-eclectic brain be flooded with the light of truth.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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When we feel that we are not sufficiently respected, we should ask ourselves whether we are living as we should.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Surely people should eventually cease to be surprised at anything? And yet they continue to be.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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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
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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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Why should I trust you? We haven't drunk from the same bowl of soup.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn