Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

Self-discipline is the key to personal greatness. It is the magic quality that opens all doors for you, and makes everything else possible. With self-discipline, the average person can rise as far and as fast as his talents and intelligence can take him. But without self-discipline, a person with every blessing of background, education and opportunity will seldom rise above mediocrity.

I think the boarding schools are like miniature versions of "Lord of the Flies."

Drill your soldiers well, and give them a pattern yourself.

Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow.

No one achieves greatness by becoming a generalist. You don't hone a skill by diluting your attention to its development. The only way to get to the next level is focus.

Man would not be the finest creature in the world if he were not too fine for it.

Every civilization depends on the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness-they cannot work and their civilization collapses.

Rarely do they appear great before their valets.

We make children and wealth and amass land and build halls and assemble armies and give great feasts, but only one thing survives us. Reputation.

Every day that you don't practice is one day longer before you achieve greatness

Persecution is a tribute the great must always pay for preeminence.

An army is a collection of armed men obliged to obey one man. Every enactment, every change of rule which impairs this principle weakens the army, impairs its value, and defeats the very object of its existence.

I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.

Man is more disposed to domination than freedom; and a structure of dominion not only gladdens the eye of the master who rears and protects it, but even its servants are uplifted by the thought that they are members of a whole, which rises high above the life and strength of single generations.

In the Army when we had judo classes, out of the class of 27 just me and another guy graduated. I grew to enjoy it because I knew I could do it well. I tried to do everything well.

And here is the lesson I learned in the army. If you want to do a thing badly, you have to work at it as though you want to do it well.

Baseball is a lot like the Army, there aren't many individuals. About the only difference is that baseball players get to stay in nice hotels instead of barracks.

There comes a special moment in everyone's life, a moment for which that person was born. That special opportunity, when he seizes it, will fulfill his mission - a mission for which he is uniquely qualified. In that moment, he will find greatness. It is his finest hour.

They were beaten to start with. They were beaten when they took them from their farms and put them in the army. That is why the peasant has wisdom, because he is defeated from the start. Put him in power and see how wise he is.

Wolves are disciplined not only when they hunt but also when they travel, when they play, and when they eat. Nature doesn't view discipline as a negative thing. Discipline is DNA. Discipline is survival.

Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.

An army is strengthened by labor and enervated by idleness.

Every now and then I meet someone certain of personal greatness. I want to pat this person on the shoulder and mutter comforting words: "Things will get better! You won't always feel so depressed! Cheer up!"

The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in.

What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements.