Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago (1973)

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Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
All classifications in this world lack sharp boundaries, and all transitions are gradual.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The price of cowardice will only be evil. We shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
One world, one mankind cannot exist in the face of six, four or even two scales of values: We shall be torn apart by this disparity of rhythm, this disparity of vibrations.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Let us drive away those cruel, greedy oppressors, governments, and the new ones, having just laid aside grenades and rifles, will be just and understanding. Far from it.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Thus it is that no cruelty whatsoever passes by without impact. Thus it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The most intense patriotism always flourishes in the rear.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is the center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you, "You are under arrest."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Only those who decline to scramble up the ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
For years, I have with a reluctant heart withheld from publication this already completed book: my obligation to those still living outweighed my obligation to the dead. But now that State Security has seized the book anyway, I have no alternative but to publish it immediately.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag, which, though scattered in an archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent — an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country inhabited by the Zek people.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn