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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer and former Gulag prisoner who won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature. *The Gulag Archipelago* was first published in 1973.
1. "And you'll find nothing better to respond with than a lamblike bleat: 'Me? What for?'"
2. "That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality."
3. "Universal innocence also gave rise to the universal failure to act. Maybe they won't take you? Maybe it will all blow over?"
4. "Since you aren't guilty, then how can they arrest you? It's a mistake! They are already dragging you along by the collar, and you still keep on exclaiming to yourself: 'It's a mistake! They'll set things straight and let me out!'"
5. "An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter... and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest."
6. "If . . . if . . . We didn't love freedom enough. And even more — we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917 [2024], and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure!"
7. "We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."
#Solzhenitsyn #GulagArchipelago #Freedom
1. "And you'll find nothing better to respond with than a lamblike bleat: 'Me? What for?'"
2. "That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality."
3. "Universal innocence also gave rise to the universal failure to act. Maybe they won't take you? Maybe it will all blow over?"
4. "Since you aren't guilty, then how can they arrest you? It's a mistake! They are already dragging you along by the collar, and you still keep on exclaiming to yourself: 'It's a mistake! They'll set things straight and let me out!'"
5. "An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter... and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest."
6. "If . . . if . . . We didn't love freedom enough. And even more — we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917 [2024], and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure!"
7. "We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."
#Solzhenitsyn #GulagArchipelago #Freedom
