A Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A great number of publications and movies on the history of the 20th century - albeit of uneven quality - are evidence of a growing demand. Quite recently, the state-owned TV channel 'Russia' aired a series based on Varlam Shalamov's works, showing the terrible, cruel truth about Stalin's camps. It was not watered down.
There's a sort of eternal, indefinable 20th century quality to 'BTAS.' We never really pegged the decade, but it's anytime in the 20th century, so I often harkened back to things from the '40s or '50s.
But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.
I consider him Stalin one of the greatest persons in the history of mankind. In the history of Russia he was, in my opinion, even greater than Lenin. Until Stalin's death I was anti-Stalinist, but I always regarded him as a brilliant personality.
The different American experience of the 20th Century is crucial because the lesson of the century for Europe, which essentially is that the human condition is tragic, led it to have a build a welfare system and a set of laws and social arrangements that are more prophylactic than idealistic. It's not about building perfect futures; it's about preventing terrible pasts. I think that is something that Europeans in the second half of the 20th century knew in their bones and Americans never did, and it's one of the big differences between the two Western cultures.
There is no strong evidence to prove significant human influence on climate on a global basis. The global cooling trend from 1940 to 1970 is inconsistent with models based on anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. There is no reliable evidence to support that the 20th century was the warmest in the last 1000 years.
Taking photographs is generally an act of 'looking at the object, whereas 'being seen' or 'showing' is what is most interest to one who does a self-portrait...self-portraits deny not only photography itself but the 20th century as an era as well...an inevitable phenomenon at the end of the 20th century.
In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.
You had a flood of immigrants, millions of them, coming to this country. What brought them here? It was the hope for a better life for them and their children. And, in the main, they succeeded. It is hard to find any century in history, in which so large a number of people experience so great an improvement in the conditions of their life, in the opportunities open to them, as in the period of the 19th and early 20th century.
I think that Russia was like a lot of other countries, a lot of empires, in being a tyranny up until the early 20th century. Then Russia had something that no other country has had, which is the longest totalitarian experiment in history.
There was engrained poetry and then when you look back at our history and in the 20th century, the last century, probably the greatest writers of the 20th century were Irish. It became our only weapon, was our poetry, our music.
I think that poets can say, "What we want is for everybody on earth to wake up free from fear and with access to medicine and clean water and education." But I don't think poets have any special insight on how to get there. And the 20th century is a pretty good record of that because so many of the great poets were Stalinists: Vallejo, Neruda, Eluard, Aragon, etc. They wrote their odes to Lenin and Stalin. They glorified some of the most violent and grotesque dictatorships of the 20th century. And a lot of the ones who were not Stalinists were fascists or fascist sympathizers.
The book that really, really shaped my politics and has forever is Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon," which is a novel based on terrible fact about what it was like in Russia during Stalin's time when people actually believed that to get to the point where the Proletariat would triumph, anything that was necessary to be done should be done; the means didn't count.
For many residents, the DMV is the face of state government - it is an office that virtually every adult needs to interact with and for far too long it has been overly bureaucratic, arduous, and - quite frankly - operating in the 21st century while relying on 20th century processes.
We have published about 800,000 documents of various kinds that relate to Russia. Most of those are critical; and a great many books have come out of our publications about Russia, most of which are critical.
Russia was the last to leave the 19th century and the most rapid to enter the mandates of the 20th century. It was not an evolution. It was not a slow process.
The heart of the security agenda is protecting lives - and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st Century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century.
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