The Communists have for decades loudly proclaimed their goal of destroying the bourgeois world, while the West merely smiled at what seemed to be an extravagant joke.

The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.

... people don't know what they are striving for. They waste themselves in senseless thrashing around for the sake of a handful of goods and die without realizing their spiritual wealth.

The earlier, the more fun. Why put it off? It’s the atomic age!

That which is called humanism, but what would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of our life

Boris Yeltsin's period was characterized by a no less irresponsible attitude to people's lives, but in other ways. In his haste to have private rather than state ownership as quickly as possible, Yeltsin started a mass, multi-billion-dollar fire sale of the national patrimony. Wanting to gain the support of regional leaders, Yeltsin called directly for separatism and passed laws that encouraged and empowered the collapse of the Russian state. This deprived Russia of its historical role for which it had worked so hard, and lowered its standing in the international community.

I will tell you something else: it is a major responsibility not only of portraiture but of all human communication for each of us to help everyone else discover the best that is in him.