Some famous and forgotten quotes to honor Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s life and courage:
“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes… we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions—especially selfish ones.”
“The name of ‘reform’ simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.”
“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.”
“It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.”
“We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsky on 11th December, 1918 (which is my birthday, by the way, but a little earlier in the century, of course) died at age 89 on August 3, 2008. His three-volume “Gulag Archipelago” unclothed and revealed the horrors of the Soviet labor camps, where, eventually, he was imprisoned. He was arrested in February 1945 for writing letters critical of Stalin and was sentenced to eight years at labor camps, which would provide the context of his future writings and his understanding of evil and the need for God.
Posted by Chip Anderson at 11:42 AM. Filed under: In the Margins • In the News • Listen & See Quotes •
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