Gulags Quotes

• The much greater crimes of the Soviet Gulags occurred over decades and cost millions of lives.

  Jean-Marie Le Pen

  Cost, Crime, Soviet

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• If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others - that had no concern for human beings.

  Dick Durbin

  Believe, Fbi Agents, Mad

  Speech on the Senate floor, www.washingtontimes.com. June 16, 2005.

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• 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

  Wisdom, Peace, Fun

  "The Gulag Archipelago". Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1973.

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• From the Soviet gulag to the Nazi concentration camps and the killing fields of Cambodia, history teaches that granting the state legal authority to kill innocent individuals has dreadful consequences.

  Pete du Pont

  Nazi Concentration Camps, Fields, Killing

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• The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Party, Heart, Humility

  "The Gulag Archipelago". Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1974.

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• 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.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Party, Heart, Years

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• 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

  Inspirational, Heart, Cutting

  "The Gulag Archipelago". Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1974.

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• We always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Pay, Chasing

  Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Anne Applebaum (2007). “The Gulag Archipelago Volume 2: An Experiment in Literary Investigation”, Harper Perennial Modern Classics

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• Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart...

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Party, Heart, Class

  "The Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Part IV, 1973.

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• When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Wall, Writing, Paper

  Source: www.independent.co.uk

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• Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Inspirational, Sweet, Night

  "The Gulag Archipelago". Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1974.

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• Left-wing zealots have often been prepared to ride roughshod over due process and basic considerations of fairness when they think they can get away with it. For them the ends always seems to justify the means. That is precisely how their predecessors came to create the gulag.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Mean, Thinking, Wings

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• Nobody who's ever been to Gulag is a pacifist.

  William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Peace, War, Pacifist

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• The government now requisitions the publics' telephone records and sifts through its emails. It labels whistle-blowers such as Edward Snowden as traitors, even though they have exposed the corruption, lawlessness and host of antidemocratic practices engaged in by established governments. Police can take DNA samples of all people arrested of a crime, whether they are proven guilty or not. The United States is incarcerating people in record numbers, imprisoning over 2.3 million inmates while 6 million people at any one time [are] under carceral supervision - more than were in Stalin's Gulag.

  Henry Giroux

  Government, Dna, Practice

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it - from The Gulag Archipelago

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Forgive Me, Forgiving, May

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• After reading The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander's stunning work of scholarship, one gains the terrible realization that, for people of color, the American criminal justice system resembles the Soviet Union's gulag—the latter punished ideas, the former punishes a condition.

  David Levering Lewis

  Reading, Ideas, Color

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• It is people who are violent, rather than "religions"; and since we secularised our politics we have had two major world wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, and the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - none of which were inspired by religion. If we want to understand the dangers of our world, we can no longer accept the old received ideas.

  Karen Armstrong

  War, Ideas, Two

  "A conversation with Karen Armstrong". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine

  Christopher Hitchens

  Gone, Way, Path

  "Christopher Hitchens: Religion Poisons Everything". Interview with Jon Wiener, www.truthdig.com. June 7, 2007.

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• Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Country, Travel, Memories

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• Guantanamo has become the gulag of our time.

  Irene Khan

  Our Time, Guantanamo

  "Guantanamo the 'gulag of our time'". Irene Khan's speech at the news conference during the celebration of the publication of Amnesty's annual report, www.denverpost.com. May 25, 2005.

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• Remind me: who was the greater mass murderer, Stalin or Hitler? Well, Stalin is thought to have been responsible for about 50 million deaths, and Hitler for a mere 25 million. What Hitler did in his concentration camps was equalled if not exceeded in foulness by the Soviet gulags, forced starvation and pogroms. What makes the achievements of communist Russia so special and different, that you can simper around in a CCCP T-shirt, while anyone demented enough to wear anything commemorating the Third Reich would be speedily banged away under the 1986 Public Order Act?

  Boris Johnson

  War, Order, Russia

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• While public school history courses in the United States stress the horrors of the German Nazi murder of 6 million Jews and Josef Stalin's pogroms against racial minorities and political dissidents in the Soviet Union, the facts that the U.S. Army's solution to the 'Indian Problem' was the prototype for the Nazi 'Final Solution' to the 'Jewish Problem' and that the North American Indian Reservation was the model for the twentieth century gulag and concentration camp, are conveniently overlooked.

  Jonathan Ott

  Stress, School, Army

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• Let your memory be your travel bag.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Travel, Memories, Next Adventure

  "Thinking About Alexander Solzhenitsyn" by Don Meyer, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 18, 2012.

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• Think of what big governments have gotten up to in this century : not one, but two world wars, the gulag, the holocaust, aerial bombing of civilian population centers, the Berlin Wall, nuclear explosions, the post office. A wicked individual might want these, but he wouldn't have the cash and connections to get them. A villainous corporation could afford them but has to market the products. The Vietnam draft would be a tough sell for even the most fiendish businessmen. "Get shot! Get killed! Get diseases from foreign women who despise you in their hearts!"

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Wall, War, Heart

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• Where did you learn your charm—the gulag?

  Nalini Singh

  Charm

  Nalini Singh (2007). “Caressed By Ice”, p.35, Penguin

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