What The Archipelago Stands On Quotes

“Marx, concerning himself with a less remote time ("Critique of the Gotha Program"), declared with equal conviction that the one and only means of correcting offenders (true, he referred to criminals; he never even conceived that his pupils might consider politicals offenders) was not solitary contemplation, not moral soul-searching, not repentance, and not languishing (for all that was superstructures!)—but productive labor. He himself had never taken a pick in hand. To the end of his days he never pushed a wheelbarrow, mined coal, felled timber, and we don't even know how his firewood was split—but he wrote that down on paper, and the paper did not resist.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV