"This so prevalent human desire to be set apart by clothes discloses us in fact, particularly to the keen eyes of the camp. It seems to us that we're clothing ourselves, but in fact we're baring ourselves, we are showing what we're worth. I did not understand that my military uniform had the same price as Matronina's red scarf." (183)

"There was a famous incantation repeated over and over again: "In the new social structure there can be no place for the discipline of the stick on which serfdom was based, nor the discipline of starvation on which capitalism is based."
And there you are -- the Archipelago managed miraculously to combine the one and the other." (155)

"Somewhere young men of our age were studying at the Sorbonne or at Oxford, playing tennis during their ample hours of relaxation, arguing about the problems of the world in student cafes. They were already being published and were exhibiting their paintings. They were twisting and turning to find ways of distorting the insufficiently original world around them in some new way. They railed against the classics for exhausting all the subjects and themes. They railed at their own governments and their own reactionaries who did not want to comprehend and adopt the advanced experience of the Soviet Union. They recorded interview through the microphones of radio reporters, listening all the time to their own voices and coquettishly elucidating what they wished to say in their last or their first book. They judged everything in the world with self-assurance, but particularly the prosperity and higher justice of our country. Only at some point in their old age, in the course of compiling encyclopedias, would they notice with astonishment that they could not find any worthy Russian names for our letters-- for all the letters of our alphabet." (195)

"It has been known for centuries that Hunger rules the world! (And all your progressive Doctrine is, incidentally, built on Hunger, on the thesis that hungry people will inevitably revolt against the well-fed.) Hunger rules every hungry human being, unless he has himself consciously decided to die." (209)

"we shall be forced to admit to our astonishment that for the first time in history the people had become its own enemy, though in return it acquired the best of friends-- the secret police." (292)

"Just keep beating one after another-- and in the end you'll hit the one you need. The primary meaning of terror lies precisely in this: even the strong and well hidden who could never be ferreted out simply will be caught and perish." (295)

"If we are speaking not about the meat grinder for unwanted millions, not about the cesspool into which they were hurled without pity for the people-- but about a serious correctional system-- the most complex of questions arises: How is it possible to give monotonously uniform punishments on the basis of a singly unified criminal code? After all, externally equal punishments for different individuals, some more moral and others more corrupted, some more sensitive and some more crude, some educated and some uneducated, are completely unequal punishments....
English thought has understood this, and they say there (I don't know how much they practice it) that the punishment must fit not only the crime but also the character of each criminal." (630)

- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956; an experiment in literary investigation, 1974, vol 2.