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?

Solzhenitsyn wrote this reflection in the aftermath of his arrest and years in the Soviet labor-camp system, when he was forced to reconsider the moral simplicity of blaming “evil” solely on external enemies or political regimes. In his major work on the Gulag, he argues that the machinery of repression was sustained not only by ideologues at the top but also by ordinary people’s compromises, fears, and self-justifications. The line about the “dividing” of good and evil through every heart appears as part of a broader meditation on personal responsibility and the difficulty of moral purification: condemning evil is easy when it is imagined as wholly outside oneself, but far harder when it requires cutting away one’s own capacity for wrongdoing.

The quote rejects a binary moral worldview in which good people fight bad people. Instead, it locates moral conflict within each person: every human being contains impulses toward both cruelty and compassion, cowardice and courage. The second sentence underscores why genuine moral reform is rare—eradicating evil is not merely a matter of punishing others but of sacrificing parts of oneself: pride, resentment, the desire for revenge, or the comfort of conformity. Solzhenitsyn’s point is both ethical and psychological: self-scrutiny is painful, and most people prefer narratives that externalize guilt. The passage thus functions as a warning against self-righteousness and a call to personal moral accountability.

“The line dividing good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.”