Lucky for me, my older sister turned me on to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn when I was still a teenager. A literary giant, Solzhenitsyn spent a chunk of his life in the Soviet gulag as the state tried to suppress his writings and thinking. I came to him through One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which I read in English class in high school, but his other writings are well worth poring over as well. Below are a few quotes from the Nobel Prize winner worth pondering... I especially like his take on the press."It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones."
"A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny. "
"Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle."
"For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones."
"Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press."
"Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul."
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