Alexander Solzhenitsyn died at the weekend. I’ve not read much written by him, particularly not his most famous works such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or The Gulag Archipelago, but I’ve read some of his writings such as his 1970 Nobel Lecture. As well as a brave man who exposed the brutality of Soviet Russia, he was also a provocative and insightful critic of the West.

I’m going to post some quotations from him over the next few days that I find particularly interesting. First up, one from his Havard Address in 1978, where he talks about “the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness” that blights the modern world:

It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.