6 Quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about evil

  • Author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • Quote

    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?

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  • Author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • Quote

    To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions...Ideology—that is what gives the evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.

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  • Author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • Quote

    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.

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  • Author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • Quote

    The falsehood of all the revolutions of history: they destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well). And they take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more.

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  • Author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • Quote

    Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide process, with East and West yielding the same results, and once again for the same reason: Men have forgotten God.

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