Tom

“Incidentally, it is very naive to say What for? At no time have governments been moralists. They never imprisoned people and executed them for having done something. They imprisoned and executed them to keep them from doing something. They imprisoned all those POW’s, of course, not for treason to the Motherland, because it was absolutely clear even to a fool that only the Vlasov men could be accused of treason. They imprisoned all of them to keep them from telling their fellow villagers about Europe. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve for.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

“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 Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Archpriest A. N. Zaozersky had surrendered all the valuables in his own church, but he defended in principle the Patriarch’s appeal regarding forced requisition as sacrilege, and he became the central personage in the trial—and would shortly be shot. (All of which went to prove that what was important was not to feed the starving but to make use of a convenient opportunity to break the back of the church.)”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

“They were vehement in their rear-line wrath (the most intense patriotism always flourishes in the rear), and they added a good deal more in mother oaths.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation