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Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian novelist, was born on December 11, 1918, and died on August 3, 2008. He is renowned for his works that profoundly exposed the dark side of the Soviet political system and is considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. more

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“If you accept a democratic system, this means that you are prepared to put up with those of its workings, legislative or administrative, with which you do not agree as well as with those that meet with your concurrence. This willingness to accept, in principle, the workings of a system based on the will of the majority, even when you yourself are in the minority, is simply the essence of democracy. Without it there could be no system of representative self-government at all. When you attempt to alter the workings of the system by means of violence or civil disobedience, this, it seems to me, can have only one of two implications; either you do not believe in democracy at all and consider that society ought to be governed by enlightened minorities such as the one to which you, of course, belong; or you consider that the present system is so imperfect that it is not truly representative, that it no longer serves adequately as a vehicle for the will of the majority, and that this leaves to the unsatisfied no adequate means of self-expression other than the primitive one of calling attention to themselves and their emotions by mass demonstrations and mass defiance of established authority.”

“Acts of civil disobedience were neither the sheer lawlessness of criminals nor the rejection of law itself by anarchists and terrorists. Instead, in civil disobedience, Hannah Arendt saw how the moral act of individual conscience—I cannot live with myself if I consent to this—could sometimes also become a political act. Civil disobedience happens when people are not heard and when a significant number of people see that their government is clearly heading in a lawless direction. The civil disobedient, Arendt said, acts in the name and for the sake of a group; he defies the law and the established authorities on the ground of basic dissent. The civil disobedient is not lawless, she is acting together with others precisely in the spirit of the laws—breathing together, Arendt says.”

“As always, the only way out is in. Withdrawal from the system is a powerful mode of nonviolent resistance, and one never more effective than when done using conscious reclamation and cultivation of our own energy.”