Just as King Midas turned everything to gold, Stalin turned everything to mediocrity.
Interpretation
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.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of creative freedom in society.
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.
To 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.
It is well known that in war, the first casualty is truth - that during any war truth is forsaken for propaganda.
At times the mirror increases a thingβs value, at times denies it.
Every breath you take, you are getting closer to the grave. But every breath you take, you can also get closer to your liberation.
Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made.
The fact is that when you make the other suffer, he will try to find relief by making you suffer more. The result is an escalation of suffering on both sides.
The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.