The Gulag Quotes

#1. 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

#2. The Gulag Archipelago, 'he informed an incredulous world that the blood-maddened Jewish terrorists had murdered sixty-six million victims in Russia from 1918 to 1957! Solzhenitsyn cited Cheka Order No. 10, issued on January 8, 1921: 'To intensify the repression of the bourgeoisie.'

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#3. By 1939 the Gulag was the largest employer in Europe.

Norman Davies

#4. Over all, there are now more people under "correctional supervision" in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

Adam Gopnik

#5. In the Gulag, it was not the case that people died like flies. Rather, flies died like people.

Martin Amis

#6. 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.

Theodore Dalrymple

#7. 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

#8. Then how unconfident of Itself this Deity was, Who didn't want Its finest creations to know right from wrong; and Who reigned by terror, insisting upon the unqualified submission of even Its closest associates, packing off all dissidents to Its blazing Siberias, the gulag-infernos of Hell ...

Salman Rushdie

#9. Guantanamo has become the gulag of our time.

Irene Khan

#10. Where did you learn your charm - the gulag?

Nalini Singh

#11. 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

#12. [Describing the soap in the gulag] It smelt as if some sacred physical law had been demeaned in its creation.

Martin Amis

#13. I grew up reading Holocaust literature at the beach, Gulag literature on winter holidays, Vietnam memoirs on spring break.

Michael Hastings

#14. I've been lucky enough to stand on both poles, but the place that seemed the remotest to me was Butugychag, a former gulag in Siberia. It is completely cut off from the rest of the world.

Michael Palin

#15. 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

#16. I can't imagine any fairminded future person feeling there was an important moral difference between the Soviet gulag and the American one.

Benjamin Kunkel

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

William F. Buckley Jr.

#18. To combat death you don't need much of a life, just one that isn't yet finished.

Herta Muller

#19. Satellite technology is a wonderful thing. From space, we can stare down and look at perimeter fences, huts, mine entrances and even sites of mass graves.

John Sweeney

#20. Leave it to the Russians to have an angel gulag.

Verlaine

#21. 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

#22. dokhodyaga, a 'goner' in Gulag-speak, one of the soon-to-be-dead, emaciated

Katherine Brabon

#23. If bones could freeze, then the brain could also be dulled and the soul could freeze over. And the soul shuddered and froze- perhaps to remain frozen forever.

Varlam Shalamov

#24. Don't be disgusting.
Don't dare me. I majored in disgusting at Gulag Community College. Lucrezia Borgia taught cooking, and Madame Defarge taught knitting. Emperor Nero taught violin and also led the cheerleading squad. I skipped all my classes and failed with distinction.

Gregory Maguire

#25. The words "I love you" could contain all the bloodthirsty despair of the abattoir, all the hopelessness of the most isolated, frozen gulag, all the lurid sadness of death row.

Pat Conroy

#26. It was officially known as Kwan-li-so Number 18. That meant Penal Labor Colony in Korean. It was a concentration camp. It was a gulag. It actually was hell, near the Taedong River in North Korea's P'yongan-namdo province.

David Baldacci

#27. 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.

Dalai Lama XIV

#28. And this man, who during three long decades had not once remembered that the world contains lilac bushes - and pansies, sandy garden paths, little carts with containers of fizzy water - this man gave a deep sigh, convinced now that life had gone on in his absence, that life had continued. (pg8)

Vasily Grossman