Insight from Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"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 to seek is where it accords with our emotions."



Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was a Russian dissident, novelist, dramatist, historian, and the winner of 1970 Nobel Prize for literature. He survived eight years in Stalin's labor camps. He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and returned to Russia in 1994. His writings that exposed the tyranny and horrors of the Soviet forced labor system included The Cancer Ward (1966), The First Circle (1964), The Gulag Archipelago (1976), and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) . His heroic figures portrayed the triumph of man over suffering and tyranny. He also warned the west of its moral bankruptcy, vulgar materialism, and probable political fate.