from NationalReview:
"The hope Solzhenitsyn gave to millions is immeasurable — but we can measure some of it. There is a woman, Youquin Wang, who chronicles China’s Cultural Revolution. She does this from the safety of the United States. But, as a girl, she was less safe. Back in the PRC, she found two authors who changed her life: Anne Frank and Solzhenitsyn. After she read The Gulag, she knew what she would do with her life: commit the lives of the lost to historical memory.
National Review is grateful to have had a relationship with Solzhenitsyn. Mainly, we admired and cheered him. But occasionally we published him — he once sent us a piece over the transom, which is to say, unsolicited. No magazine could dream of more.
Malcolm Muggeridge called him “the noblest human being alive.” After passing away yesterday, he is now one of the noblest human beings on earth or in heaven. He is one of the greatest witnesses in all history. And, like all great witnesses, he was inspired by love, the crowning quality of his work and life."
and from my favorite of Solzhenitsyn's, the Harvard Commencement Address, is must reading:
"A Decline in Courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society."
"Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to form a herd, shutting off successful development. "
“[T]ruth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.”
"If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.
This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but -- upward. "
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