Rajiv Chopra

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the 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. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . . . an unuprooted small corner of evil.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 2]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

“China remained a poor country, with a per capita gross domestic product of only $175 in 1978. Industrial and agricultural shortfalls were severe; in 1975, for example, actual steel output fell 36 percent short of the planned target, and grain was 9 percent below the planned target.19 Chinese economists reported scenes of stark indigence: “I remember going to a village where they had only one blanket for the whole family, and only one bowl,” a researcher recalled.20 Visiting the developed world brought more bad news.”
― Julian Gewirtz, Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s

“Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time. Codes and manuals create patterned behaviour. All patterned behaviour tends to go unquestioned, gathering destructive momentum. —Darwi Odrade”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

“And the truth is that I truly didn’t think of them as human beings. “They’re not human beings, they’re kulak trash!” – that’s what I heard again and again, that’s what everyone kept repeating. And when I think about it all now, I wonder who first talked about kulak trash. Lenin? Was it really Lenin? How the kulaks suffered. In order to kill them, it was necessary to declare that kulaks are not human beings. Just as the Germans said that Yids are not human beings. That’s what Lenin and Stalin said too: The kulaks are not human beings. But that’s a lie. They are people. They are human beings. I can see now that we are all human beings.60”
― Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows