rmj

“The strength of the Government lies in the people's ignorance, and the Government knows this, and will therefore always oppose true enlightenment.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Attempts to account for the “confessions” envelop the whole affair in a fog of mysticism so dense that nothing can be seen through it. In reality, however, the matter is quite simple indeed: if Europeans of the middle ages who fell into the hands of the Holy Inquisition could confess dealings with the devil, if Galileo recanted his view to the effect that the earth revolves around the sun, why are we so shocked that Stalin’s victims do the same? The second, and more important, consideration is that the defendants were not revolutionists who fought for the overthrow of the existing regime, but Communist satraps, potentates and bureaucratic dignitaries who built that regime and had been in power for a long time. Through many years of undisputed rule they had lost all their revolutionary qualities. They came to that trial, not as revolutionists, not as dauntless fighters against an intolerable system, as such, but as magnates intriguing and scheming against the head of the regime. The regime itself remained as sacred to them as the monarchy was to the high officials of the Tsar’s regime, guilty of some minor opposition.”
― Grigori Petrovitch Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: The Leninist Counter-revolution

“The gas lamps in the street went out. Shadows crept along the walls. So there were ghosts. During the night they came flying here and crouched over the books. Then they read. They needed no light, they had such big eyes. Now he would not touch a single book on the upper shelves, nor on the lower ones either. He crept under the counter and his teeth chattered. Ten thousand books and a ghost crouching over each one. That was why it was so quiet. Sometimes he heard them turn over a page. They read as fast as he did himself. He might have grown used to them, but there were ten thousand of them and perhaps one of them would bite.”
― Elias Canetti, Auto-da-Fé

“One can submit to, but one cannot accept the way
production is now organised. If one stops oneself from thinking of all this, one makes oneself an accomplice in what is happening. One has to do something quite different: take one's place in this system of things and do something about it.”
― Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy