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About this quote

What does it mean?
The author refuses to recommend the contemporary Western society as a model for his own country due to its perceived flaws.
In plain terms
He would not tell his country to copy the West as it is today.
What can you take from it?
Not all modern societies serve as good models for development.

Where it applies

  • comparative politics
  • cultural exchange
  • policy making

Putting it to work

  • critique societal models
  • reject bad examples

Questions to consider

  • What makes a society a good model?
  • Should nations emulate each other?

Another view

This view might ignore specific strengths within Western democracies.

More from Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  1. Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden,…

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  2. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain o…

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  3. A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as…

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