Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard commencement address was the most controversial and commented-upon public speech of the 20th century.
He went to the center of power and prestige and told them they were a spiritual wasteland.
10 unforgettable quotes from his speech 🧵
He went to the center of power and prestige and told them they were a spiritual wasteland.
10 unforgettable quotes from his speech 🧵
1) A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days.
2) Socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.
3) The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It's time, in the West -- It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
4) A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger.
5) Only moral criteria can help the West against communism's well planned world strategy. There are no other criteria.
6) In spite of the abundance of information, or maybe because of it, the West has difficulties in understanding reality such as it is.
7) All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the 20th century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the 19th Century.
8) Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism; radicalism had to surrender to socialism; and socialism could never resist communism.
9) In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. But Western intellectuals still look at it with interest and with empathy.
10) Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction.
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