Solzhenitsyn Gulag Quotes & Sayings

All history is one continuous pestilence. There is no truth and there is no illusion. There is nowhere to appeal and nowhere to go. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

But it is impossible to picture any of our interrogators, right up to Abakumov and Beria, wanting to slip into prisoner's skin even for one hour, or feeling compelled to sit and meditate in solitary confinement.
Their branch of service does not require them to be educated people of broad culture and broad views - and they are not. Their branch of service does not require them to think logically - and they do not. Their branch of service requires only that they carry out orders exactly and be impervious to suffering - and that is what they do and what they are. We who have passed through their hands feel suffocated when we think of the legion, which is stripped bare of universal human ideals. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In his 1973 "literary investigation," The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn exposed the practices of the Soviet penal system: "If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the 'secret brand'); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums. — Donnie Eichar

I don't know. I guess I'd just like to see you live one day for yourself. — Jessica Brody

The author of the hymn 'Amazing Grace', John Newton, who once was a slave ship captain, and who became a Christian preacher and an enemy of the slave trade, once said: 'I have reason to praise [God] for my trials, for, most probably, I should have been ruined without them.' The author of The Gulag Archipelago , Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who suffered for twenty years in the hellish prison camps he describes in that book, wrote: '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.' This does not mean that Newton would have chosen to go through his trials, or that Solzhenitsyn in any way enjoyed the terrible suffering of his imprisonment. But it means that in retrospect they can see that God used those difficulties to bless them in the long run. — Eric Metaxas

In The Gulag Archipelago, for example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn remarks that Shakespeare's evildoers, Macbeth notably among them, stop short at a mere dozen corpses because they have no ideology. — Theodore Dalrymple

I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it - from The Gulag Archipelago — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Professor Mcgonagall: Why is it when something bad happens, it's always you three? Ron: Believe me, professor, I've been asking myself the exact same thing for the past six years. — J.K. Rowling

Don't give me that look. I'm not trying to find out who you are. I don't care who you are. I just want to know why it is you are the way you are. — Maggie Stiefvater

Where an open war is impossible, oppression can continue quietly behind the scenes. Terrorism. Guerrilla warfare, violence, prisons, concentration camps. I ask you: Is this peace?

The true antipode of peace is violence. And those who want peace in the world should remove not only war from the world but also violence. If there is no open war but there is still violence, that is not peace. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: 'It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.'

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

What you had to have is usually tabulated as follows: luck; the ability to adapt, immediately and radically; a talent for inconspicuousness; solidarity with another individual or with a group; the preservation of decency ("the people who had no tenets to live by - of whatever nature - generally succumbed" no matter how ruthlessly they struggled); the constantly nurtured conviction of innocence (an essential repeatedly emphasised by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago); immunity to despair; and, again, luck. — Martin Amis

We have been happily borne - or perhaps have unhappily dragged our weary way - down the long and crooked streets of our lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood, rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. We have never given a thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to penetrate them with our vision or our understanding. But there is where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away from us. In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous number of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in these fences. All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! And all of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and four white 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 to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.
That's all there is to it! You are arrested! — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

To outsmart you they thought up work squads - but not squads like the ones outside the camps, where everyone is paid his separate wage. Everything was so arranged in the camp that the prisoners egged one another on. It was like this: either you all got a bit extra or you all croaked. You're loafing you bastard - do you think I'm willing to go hungry just because of you? Put your guts into it, slob. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not only are the philosophies of animal rights and animal welfare separated by irreconcilable differences ... the enactment of animal welfare measures actually impedes the achievement of animal rights ... Welfare reforms, by their very nature, can only serve to retard the pace at which animal rights goals are achieved. — Gary L. Francione

In 1954 the gulag at Kengir witnessed an uprising by Christian and Muslim prisoners. The guards were driven out, and for forty days worship was freely practiced in the camp. Solzhenitsyn later documented the atmosphere of elation and idealism which prevailed in this doomed island of faith: the Muslims put on turbans and robes again, and 'the grey-black camp was a blaze of color'. The Chechens made kites from which they showered the neighboring villages with messages about the evils of the atheist system. Many marriages were celebrated. Survivors recall the forty days as a testimony to a possible way of living which had been suffocated by dreary unbelief. Delight in the present, and the knowledge of heaven outweighed the awareness of Khrushchev's inevitable revenge. The rebels were crushed under the attacks of tanks, but in the long term, this same spiritual outweighing insured the atheist dystopia's downfall. — Abdal Hakim Murad

Solzhenitsyn recounted a party conference in Moscow that ended with a tribute to Stalin. Everyone stood and clapped wildly for three minutes, then four, then five ... and then no one dared to be the first to stop. After eleven minutes of increasingly stinging palms, a factory director on the platform finally sat down, followed by the rest of the grateful assembly. He was arrested that evening and sent to the gulag for ten years.278 — Steven Pinker

The Gulag Archipelago, 'he informed an incredulous world that the blood-maddened Jewish terrorists had murdered sixty-six million victims in Russia from 1918 to 1957! Solzhenitsyn cited Cheka Order No. 10, issued on January 8, 1921: 'To intensify the repression of the bourgeoisie.' — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[On Addis Ababa:] Among the city's handicaps are an immaturity for which no one can be blamed, as it was founded only eighty years ago, and a proliferation of architectural excesses for which many people can and should be blamed. — Dervla Murphy

I think sometimes negative campaigning, like so much, is in the eye of the beholder, and I don't think we'll ever get rid of it. — Peter Jennings