At what point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about one of them individually...and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest.
Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote compares Stalin's impact on society to King Midas, suggesting that instead of creating value, Stalin diminished it.
In this quote, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn draws a parallel between King Midas, who turned everything he touched into gold, and Joseph Stalin, who 'turned everything to mediocrity.' This suggests that Stalin's rule degraded the quality of life and creativity in society, resulting in widespread mediocrity rather than excellence or value. It implies a critique of totalitarianism and the detrimental effects of oppressive leadership on culture and human potential.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of creative freedom in society.
More from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
All quotes βTo do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good... Ideology - that is what gives devildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.
Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word 'modernity' if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.
To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.
Like a bicycle, like a wheel that, once rolling, is stable only so long as it keeps moving but falls when its momentum stops, so the game between a man and woman, once begun, can exist only so long as it progresses. If the forward movement today is no more than it was yesterday, the game is over.
It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.
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Baby, we have no choice of what color we're born or who our parents are or whether we're rich or poor. What we do have is some choice over what we make of our lives once we're here.
This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.
I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage. Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.
I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality.
Man has two great spiritual needs. One is for forgiveness. The other is for goodness.
Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe---in fact, random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not hold itself.