"Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for-all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, historian, and dissident whose works exposed the Soviet forced-labor camp system. His major books include One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970.