It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes… we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions – especially selfish ones.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYNThe next war… may well bury Western civilization forever.
More Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes
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Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.
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Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme.
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How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand one who’s cold?
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Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.
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It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.
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Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you – you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.
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The name of ‘reform’ simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.
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In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.
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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.
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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.
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If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?
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For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
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Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
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Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
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A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
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