Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.

The Gulag Archipelago had already begun its malignant life and would shortly metastasize throughout the whole body of the nation.

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.

A great writer is, so to speak, a second government. That’s why no regime anywhere has ever loved its great writers, only its minor ones.