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We have to condemn the very idea that some people have the right to repress others.

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
Repress
Condemn
Idea
Others
Ideas
Right
People

More quotes by 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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My wish for you... is that your skeptic-eclectic brain be flooded with the light of truth.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Many of you have already found out, and others will find out in the course of their lives, that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate our attention totally on it's pursuit. But even while it eludes us, the illusion of knowing it still lingers and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth seldom is pleasant it is almost invariably bitter.
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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A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage . . . . Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The price of cowardice will only be evil. We shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The secret is that when you've been pitched head first into hell you just write about it
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Morality is always higher than law and we cannot forget this ever.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The same old caveman feeling-greed, envy, violence, and mutual hate, which along the way assumed respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial struggle, mass struggle, labor-union struggle-are tearing our world to pieces.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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One word of truth outweighs the whole world.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Modern society is hypnotized by socialism. It is prevented by socialism from seeing the mortal danger it is in. And one of the greatest dangers of all is that you have lost all sense of danger, you cannot even see where it's coming from as it moves swiftly towards you.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask by whom has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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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