"…How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: what would things…

"…How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: what would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if during periods of mass arrests people had simply not sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand… The Organs [police] would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and the cursed machine would have ground to a halt."

-Alexander Solzhenitsyn