#OTD 45 years ago at Harvard University, Alexander Solzhenitsyn shocked his audience with a searing indictment of Western liberalism and materialism: americanrhetoric.com/speeches/alexa… "[I]n early democracies, as in the American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility."

"At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms and finally the land itself..." "When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard 'having children' as a question of pros and cons, the great turning point has come... When reasons have to be put forward at all in a question of life, life itself has become questionable..."