Len

“But in the 17th century Russian Orthodoxy was gravely weakened by an internal schism. In the 18th, the country was shaken by Peter's forcibly imposed transformations, which favored the economy, the state, and the military at the expense of the religious spirit and national life. And along with this lopsided Petrine enlightenment, Russia felt the first whiff of secularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“I leaf through the ancient philosophers and find my newest discoveries there.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“Among all the many great transitions that have marked the evolution of Western civilisation ... there has been only one—the triumph of Christianity —that can be called in the fullest sense a "revolution": a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity's prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as to actually have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good.”
― David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

“...it's only on a black day that you begin to have friends.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle