Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Your punishment for having a knife when they searched you would be very different from the thief’s. For him to have a knife was mere misbehavior, tradition, he didn’t know any better. But for you to have one was ‘terrorism.’” #Solzhenitsyn

“We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. 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 thousandfold in the future.”

“Tank columns in East Berlin, Budapest and Prague declared that they were there ‘by the will of the people’, but not once did the British government recall its ambassadors from any of these places in protest.”

“There is a limit beyond which the natural cause of the ‘progressive principles’, of the ‘dawn of a new era’, becomes nothing more than conscious and calculated hypocrisy; because it makes life more comfortable to live.”

“Britain took a moral stand against Hitler, and that was what inspired it to one of the most heroic acts of resistance in its history.”

“Unseemly deeds are usually accompanied by high-sounding, even brilliant, justifications.”

“We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others.”

“Russia, which people considered a backward country, had to leap forward a whole century to overtake all the other countries in the world. We endured inhuman experiences which the Western world…has no real conception of and is frightened even to think about.”

“If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

“[A]s is so often the case with matters of social significance, we only notice things that are not contradictory to our own feelings.”

“There is a German proverb which runs Mut verloren - alles verloren: ‘When courage is lost, everything is lost.’”

“[World War I] was a war (the memory of which seems to be fading) when Europe, bursting with health and abundance, fell into a rage of self-mutilation which could not but sap its strength for a century or more, and perhaps forever.”

"Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions.”

“The duties of an interrogator require work, of course: you have to come in during the day, at night, sit for hours and hours—but not split your skull over “proof.” (Let the prisoner’s head ache over that.)”

“Liberalism was inevitably pushed aside by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could not stand up to communism.”

“The complex and deadly crush of life in the East has produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being.”

“A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human personality in the West while in the East it has become firmer and stronger.”

“There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen.”

“Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence.”

“Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity. It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!”

“Recently some foreign boy from the Western side fell into the Spree River. Some people wanted to pull him out, but the East German border guards opened fire. “No, no, don’t save him.” And so this innocent boy drowned.”