{"quotes":[{"text":"No zek had the right to stay one second in his workroom without the supervision of a free employee because prudence dictated that the prisoner would be bound to use that unsupervised second to break into the steel safe with a lead pencil, photograph its secret documents with a trouser button, explode an atom bomb, and fly to the moon.","author":"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn","tags":["1968","paranoia","prison-life","sarcasm","soaring-to-the-ceiling"],"id":5062,"author_id":"Aleksandr+Solzhenitsyn"},{"text":"It was clearly a prisoner's craftwork; that is, the most painstaking work in the world, for prisoners have nowhere to hurry to.","author":"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn","tags":["1968","artisans","hurry","prison","prison-life"],"id":23035,"author_id":"Aleksandr+Solzhenitsyn"},{"text":"The most striking difference between the ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality. In other words, one destroyed the dignity of human thought whereas the others destroy the dignity of human action. The old manipulators of logic were the concern of the philosopher, whereas the modern manipulators of facts stand in the way of the historian. For history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility—based upon the fact that it is enacted by men and therefore can be understood by men—is in danger, whenever facts are no longer held to be part and parcel of the past and present world, and are misused to prove this or that opinion.","author":"Hannah Arendt","tags":["1968","antisemitism","communism","historians","history","ideology","marxism","post-factual","post-truth","race-theory","reality-control","sophism","totalitarianism"],"id":30590,"author_id":"Hannah+Arendt"},{"text":"Wherever they went—Moscow, Tehran, the Syrian coast, Switzerland—a furnished house, villa, or apartment awaited the young couple. And their philosophies of life were the same: 'We have only one life!' So take everything life can give, except one thing: the birth of a child. For a child is an idol who sucks dry the juices of your being without any return for your sacrifices, not even ordinary gratitude.","author":"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn","tags":["1968","bourgeois-indulgence","childlessness","yolo","youth"],"id":32050,"author_id":"Aleksandr+Solzhenitsyn"},{"text":"A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient. Terror as we know it today strikes without any preliminary provocation, its victims are innocent even from the point of view of the persecutor. This was the case in Nazi Germany when full terror was directed against Jews, I.E., against people with certain common characteristics which were independent of their specific behavior. In Soviet Russia the situation is more confused, but the facts, unfortunately, are only too obvious. On the one hand, the Bolshevik system, unlike the Nazis, never admitted theoretically that it could practice terror against innocent people, and though in view of certain practices this may look like hypocrisy, it makes quite a difference. Russian practice, on the other hand, is even more 'advanced' than the German in one respect: arbitrariness of terror is not even limited by racial differentiation, while the old class categories have long since been discarded, so that anybody in Russia may suddenly become a victim of the police terror. We are not concerned here with the ultimate consequence of rule by terror—namely, that nobody, not even the executors, can ever be free of fear; in our context we are dealing merely with the arbitrariness by which victims are chosen, and for this it is decisive that they are objectively innocent, that they are chosen regardless of what they may or may not have done.","author":"Hannah Arendt","tags":["1968","antisemitism","communism","nazism","police-terror","rule-by-fear","soviet-union","terrorism","totalitarianism"],"id":73348,"author_id":"Hannah+Arendt"},{"text":"All history is one continuous pestilence. There is no truth and there is no illusion. There is nowhere to appeal and nowhere to go.","author":"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn","tags":["1968","gulag","history","pessimism","post-truth","prison","resignation","ruska-doronin"],"id":86640,"author_id":"Aleksandr+Solzhenitsyn"},{"text":"—and I say you still haven't answered my question, Father Bleu.'Haven't I, dear lady? I thought I stated that death is merely the beginning. ","author":"John Jakes","tags":["1968","death","fear-of-death","here-is-thy-sting","mysticism"],"id":96867,"author_id":"John+Jakes"},{"text":"What imperialists actually wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of the body politic. Imperialist expansion had been touched off by a curious kind of economic crisis, the overproduction of capital and the emergence of 'superfluous' money, the result of oversaving, which could no longer find productive investment within national borders. For the first time, investment of power did not pave the way for investment of money, since uncontrollable investments in distant countries threatened to transform large strata of society into gamblers, to change the whole capitalist economy from a system of production to a system of financial speculation, and to replace the profits of production with profits in commissions. The decade immediately before the imperialist era, the seventies of the last century, witnessed an unparalleled increase in swindles, financial scandals, and gambling in the stock market.","author":"Hannah Arendt","tags":["1968","bourgeoisie","capitalism","imperialism","investment","swindle"],"id":103225,"author_id":"Hannah+Arendt"},{"text":"Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.","author":"Hannah Arendt","tags":["1968","politics","powerlessness","totalitarianism"],"id":166155,"author_id":"Hannah+Arendt"},{"text":"The harder life is for a man when he is young, the easier it will be in the future.","author":"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn","tags":["1968","aphorism","hard-life"],"id":209756,"author_id":"Aleksandr+Solzhenitsyn"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":21,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}