“At its birth, violence acts openly and even takes pride in itself.
But as soon as it is reinforced and its position is strengthened,
it begins to sense the rarefied atmosphere around it,
and it can go further only when fogged about with lies,
cloaked in honeyed hypocritical words.

It does not always nor invariably choke its victims;
more often it demands of them only the oath of the lie,
only participation in the lie.

Simple is the ordinary courageous human being’s act
of not participating in the lie,
of not supporting false actions!
What his stand says is: So be it that this takes place in the world —
that it even reigns in the world —
but let it not be with my complicity.”

from Beauty Will Save the World: The Nobel Lecture on Literature
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1972