The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf.

Universal innocence also gave rise to the universal failure to act.

A person who is not inwardly prepared for the use of violence against him is always weaker than the person committing the violence.

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

But peasants are a silent people, without a literary voice, nor do they write complaints or memoirs.

But the wave of 1937 swept up and carried off to the Archipelago people of position, people with a Party past, yes, educated people, around whom were many who had been wounded and remained in the cities

It is well known that any organ withers away if it is not used.

And then again: “In what block of a big city, in what factory, in what village . . . are there not . . . saboteurs who call themselves intellectuals?”

Quote by Lenin

the Patriarch Tikhon was arrested and two resounding trials were held, followed by the execution

After all, even one percent of just one million fills up a dozen full-blooded camps.

Indeed, the actual boundaries of human equilibrium are very narrow, and it is not really necessary to use a rack or hot coals to drive the average human being out of his mind.

What won’t idle, well-fed, unfeeling people invent?

Otherwise what historians of our torturers we would be! For it is certain they will never describe themselves as they actually are.

Power is a poison well known for thousands of years.

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.

“If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?” It is a dreadful question if one really answers it honestly.

And one might think I would have gotten through my thick skull what it was like always to obey people who were perhaps not worthy of your obedience and to do it on a hungry stomach to boot.

Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig.

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?

One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being.

Do you think you can build a just society on a foundation of self-serving and envious people?

Separate church and state properly and do not touch the church; you will not lose a thing thereby.

Well, of course, there was no great merit in that—to become a human being at the moment of death. Similarly, loving one’s own children is no proof of virtue.

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.

Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.

From the most ancient times justice has been a two-part concept: virtue triumphs, and vice is punished.

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

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.

Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity.

One thing is absolutely definite: not everything that enters our ears penetrates our consciousness. Anything too far out of tune with our attitude is lost, either in the ears themselves or somewhere beyond, but it is lost.

Realizing that there was nothing he could accomplish, Fastenko quite simply wanted, in a very human way, to stay alive.

“Cruelty is invariably accompanied by sentimentality. It is the law of complementaries.

Dostoyevsky was the right kind of author for prisoners to read!

He who draws a conclusion only halfway fails to draw it at all.

“Once they’ve skinned you, there’s no point in grieving over the wool.”

And where had all that Russian generosity gone? It had been replaced by political consciousness.

The foundation stones of a great building are destined to groan and be pressed upon; it is not for them to crown the edifice.

“Joyful sounds mean nought to the traitor.”

But among them was there ever so multimillioned foul a deed as this: to betray one’s own soldiers and proclaim them traitors?

Even the most broad-minded of us can embrace only that part of the truth into which our own snout has blundered.)

What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve for.

It takes a fool to rush off to war!

Well-fed horses don’t rampage.

A people needs defeat just as an individual needs suffering and misfortune: they compel the deepening of the inner life and generate a spiritual upsurge.

But I had begun to sense a truth inside myself: if in order to live it is necessary not to live, then what’s it all for?

It has, after all, been explained to us that the heart of the matter is not personal guilt, but social danger.

In all probability, an excellent judicial system is the last fruit of the most mature society, or else one needs a Solomon.

Which comes first—the chicken or the egg? The people or the system?

That was a famous question: Who is to blame?

true strength of character or courage. Those who have condemned many others to be shot often wilt at the prospect of their own death.