Taken from Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 book The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956, the more contextualized excerpt is:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

This reminds me of watching the television with my son. Every time there’s conflict among the characters, he always asks ​“is he a good guy or a bad guy?” It’s rarely as cut and dry as that as we all know. My blanket statement has always been—“sometimes good guys do bad things and sometimes bad guys do good things.”

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