Gulag Quotes

1. "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"
Author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

2. "Reigns of terror are thus the bastard child of the Enlightenment. Terror in the name of utopian ideals would rise again and again in the coming centuries. The Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulags were spawned by the enlightenment. Fascists and communists were bred on visions of human perfectibility. Tens of millions of people have been murdered in the futile effort to reform human nature and build utopian societies. During these reigns of terror, science and reason served, as they continue to serve, interests purportedly devoted to the common good-- and to vast mechanisms of repression and mass killing. The belief in human perfectibility, in history as a march towards a glorious culmination, is a malformed theology."
Author: Chris Hedges

3. "He told me that while he was in a Chinese Communist gulag for almost eighteen years, he faced danger on a few occasions. I thought he was referencing a threat to his own life. But when I asked, "What danger?" he answered, "Losing compassion toward the Chinese."
Author: Dalai Lama XIV

4. "…of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines…Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred…As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God, but the face of his enemy. It is…a faith that…has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead."
Author: David Bentley Hart

5. "Werewolves are not a subject for academe," she said, "but you know what the professors would be saying if they were. ‘Monsters die out when the collective imagination no longer needs them. Species death like this is nothing more than a shift in the aggregate psychic agenda. In ages past the beast in man was hidden in the dark, disavowed. The transparency of modern history makes that impossible: We've seen ourselves in the concentration camps, the gulags, the jungles, the killing fields, we've read ourselves in the annals of True Crime. Technology turned up the lights and now there's no getting away from the fact: The beast is redundant. It's been us all along."
Author: Glen Duncan

6. "I could pour my love in a coffee cup and the shivering and skeptical would beg me to drink it on a cold winter morning. And could they drink from my coffee cup? No, because it's not like there is coffee in there, or even hot chocolate. My love is the only thing filling that cup, and everyone knows (well, everyone but Agatha knows) that you can't drink my love, you can only eat it. That's because my love is frozen like 32 degrees spun around 180 degrees, translated to Inuit, shipped to Siberia, tutored in a gulag, and sent back to the US in the form of a Martini on the rocks by a bartender named Martin Rock."
Author: Jarod Kintz

7. "The much greater crimes of the Soviet Gulags occurred over decades and cost millions of lives."
Author: Jean Marie Le Pen

8. "In the Gulag, it was not the case that people died like flies. Rather, flies died like people."
Author: Martin Amis

9. "[Describing the soap in the gulag] It smelt as if some sacred physical law had been demeaned in its creation."
Author: Martin Amis

10. "[Father Dmitry] "lived through collectivization, the crushing of the 80 percent of Russians that were peasants. He served as a soldier in World War Two, when millions of peasants died defending the government that had crushed them. He spent eight years in the gulag, the network of labour camps created to break the spirit of anyone who still resisted. He rose again to speak out for his parishioners in the 1960's and 1970's, striving to help young Russians create a freer and fairer society."
Author: Oliver Bullough

11. "Not only to myself or before the mirror or at the hour of my death, which I hope will be long in coming, but in the presence of my children and my wife and in the face of the peaceful life I'm building, I must acknowledge: (1) That under Stalin I wouldn't have wasted my youth in the gulag or ended up with a bullet in the back of my head. (2) That in the McCarthy era I wouldn't have lost my job or had to pump gas at a gas station. (3) That under Hitler, however, I would have been one of those who chose the path of exile, and that under Franco I wouldn't have composed sonnets to the caudillo or the Holy Virgin like so many lifelong democrats. One thing is as true as the other. My bravery has its limits, certainly, but so does what I'm willing to swallow. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy."
Author: Roberto Bolaño

12. "In The Gulag Archipelago, for example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn remarks that Shakespeare's evildoers, Macbeth notably among them, stop short at a mere dozen corpses because they have no ideology."
Author: Theodore Dalrymple

13. "The obvious differences apart, Karl Marx was no more a reliable prophet than was the Reverend Jim Jones. Karl Marx was a genius, an uncannily resourceful manipulator of world history who shoved everything he knew, thought, and devised into a Ouija board from whose movements he decocted universal laws. He had his following, during the late phases of the Industrial Revolution. But he was discredited by historical experience longer ago than the Wizard of Oz: and still, great grown people sit around, declare themselves to be Marxists, and make excuses for Gulag and Afghanistan."
Author: William F. Buckley Jr.

Gulag Quotes Pictures