November 1916 Quotes

“He read as a hare or a kangaroo hops, barely touching the ground, carrying off crumbs of soil on its paws.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, November 1916

“Education is necessary above all to make the country strong and industrious.” “Yes, but it must not challenge the people’s time-tested view of the world. When half-baked people with a grudge against the world go in for teaching, education damages young minds. And the more schools there are, the more people they corrupt.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, November 1916

“these people had regarded the word “patriot” as a badge of shame.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, November 1916

“The time in which we live has unfathomable depths beneath it. Our age is a mere film on the surface of time.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, November 1916

“But our brigade chaplain has a very convincing way of putting it. He says that logically the opposite of war is not peace but absence of war. The opposite of peace is the world’s bad conscience.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, November 1916

“On the simple calculation that my worst enemy’s worst enemy is my friend, the Kaiser’s government was the best ally in the world.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, November 1916

“the very company he was hoping for seemed to have assembled, intent on hearing what he had to say, and on questioning him—but perhaps they asked questions only out of politeness, and there was indeed no real reason for them to listen, since party politics was their sole interest”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, November 1916

“power corrupts, and corrupts more thoroughly than ever when the ruler is spiritually weak.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, November 1916

“Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state’s essential functions.” Father Severyan’s enunciation was very precise. “War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from violence.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, November 1916