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It is almost always impossible to evaluate at the time events which you have already experienced, and to understand their meaning with the guidance of their effects. All the more unpredictable and surprising to us will be the course of future events.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power — he’s free again.

The First Circle (1968)

Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.

At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years.

I believe that world literature has it in its power to help mankind, in these its troubled hours, to see itself as it really is, notwithstanding the indoctrinations of prejudiced people and parties.

Nobel lecture (1970)

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

The Gulag Archipelago (1973)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.