Best Quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Top 10)
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If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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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
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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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Human rights' are a fine thing, but how can we make ourselves sure that our rights do not expand at the expense of the rights of others. A society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing to adversity. If we do not wish to be ruled by a coercive authority, then each of us must rein himself in...A stable society is achieved not by balancing opposing forces but by conscious self-limitation: by the principle that we are always duty-bound to defer to the sense of moral justice.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and can be confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.
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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A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
More Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes
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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
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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
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Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The name of 'reform' simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word 'modernity' if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The central government possesses no plan of finding the way out of this blind alley.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us...than the need for any external expansion of our power.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn