Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that "past" which "ought not to be stirred up.”

“It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.”

“Power is a poison well known for thousands of years. If only no one were ever to acquire material power over others! But to the human being who has faith in some force that holds dominion over all of us, and who is therefore conscious of his own limitations, power is not necessarily fatal. For those, however, who are unaware of any higher sphere, it is a deadly poison. For them there is no antidote.”

“Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted"—"not permitted"—"this you can and that you can't." Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read.-Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers”

“.. и уши развешивали слушать от старых лагерников "как надо в лагере жить." А как надо жить (и как умереть) мы обязаны знать и без всякого лагеря.”

“Live not by lies!”

“The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul.”

“Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you - you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.”

“How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there, and trains thunder off to it--but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination. And at ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they've never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or any one of its innumerable islands.Those who go to the Archipelago to administer it get there via the training schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.Those who go there to be guards are conscripted via the military conscription centers.And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest.Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest."If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these dis­placements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience,can gasp out only: "Me? What for?"And this is a question which, though repeated millions andmillions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somer­sault from one state into another.We have been happily borne—or perhaps have unhappilydragged our weary way—down the long and crooked streets ofour lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood,rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. We have never givena thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to pene­trate them with our vision or our understanding. But there iswhere the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards awayfrom us. In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous num­ber of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in thesefences. All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! Andall of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and fourwhite male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but none­theless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap,ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate toour past life, is slammed shut once and for all.That's all there is to it! You are arrested!And you'll find nothing better to respond with than a lamblikebleat: "Me? What for?"That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow whichshifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible intoomnipotent actuality.That's all. And neither for the first hour nor for the first daywill you be able to grasp anything else.”

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

“The sole substitute for an experience we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.”

“Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”

“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 . . . . Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.”

“The solemn pledge to abstain from telling the truth was called socialist realism.”

“Many of you have already found out, and others will find out in the course of their lives, that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate our attention totally on it's pursuit. But even while it eludes us, the illusion of knowing it still lingers and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.”

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil. Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.”

“A great disaster had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.”

“The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all”