Sunday, August 31, 2025

#522: “With His Whole Soul”

“You assist an unjust administration most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil administration never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his whole soul. Disobedience of the laws of an evil state is therefore a duty.*

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* Non-Violent Resistance - Often misquoted as "You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance."
Response to a journalist's question about what his message to the world was. Mahatma: Life of Gandhi 1869-1948 (1968) Reel 13
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (... 2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was an Indian lawyer,[3] anti-colonial nationalist,[4] and political ethicist,[5] who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule,[6] and in turn inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The honorific Mahātmā (Sanskrit: "great-souled", "venerable"), first applied to him in 1914 in South Africa, is now used throughout the world.[7][8] / Born and raised in a Hindu family in coastal Gujarat, western India, Gandhi trained in law at the Inner Temple, London, and was called to the bar at age 22 in June 1891. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi

Sunday, August 24, 2025

#521: "Through All Human Hearts"

"[T]he 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." 
[BUT then by extension, it passes through every creation or organization of humankind, including states, classes, and political parties. -- SMS]

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 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 2]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (p. 746). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Sunday, August 10, 2025

#520: “Watch Where You’re Going”

Yes, the devil is strong! Our Fatherland is like this: to shove it a yard or two along the road to tyranny, a frown, a little cough, is enough. But to drag it an inch along the road to freedom you must harness a hundred oxen and keep after each of them with a cudgel: “Watch where you’re pulling! Watch where you’re going!”
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Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 3]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (pp. 450-451). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn ... (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) ... was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer, and political prisoner. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union (USSR), in particular the Gulag system. | From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn

Sunday, August 3, 2025

#519: Evildoers DO Exist

“Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.”*
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*Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (p. 174). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.


Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn ... (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) ... was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer, and political prisoner. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union (USSR), in particular the Gulag system. | From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn