“It is with a strange feeling that those of us who came from the Soviet Union look upon the West of today...[W]e contemplate the West from what will be your future, or look back seventy years, to see our past suddenly repeating itself. And what we see is always the same: adults deferring to the opinion of children; the younger generation carried away by shallow worthless ideas; professors scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for the words they squander so profusely; universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them; the majority passively obsessed by a feeling of doomed; feeble governments; societies whose defensive reactions have become paralysed; spiritual confusion leading to political upheaval. What will happen as a result of all this lies ahead of us. But the time is near, and from bitter memory we can easily predict what these events will be.” -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ‘Warning to the West’ (Macmillan, 1986), 129-130.
When religious tears (as in New England) are applied to public office, the site is deprived of a wealth of gifts in the unconverted world. - - Mostyn Roberts, The Subversive Puritan, Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience, p. 205
The language of protest, pronouncement and proclamation has almost completely replaced the language of persuasion. - Os Guinness, The Case for Civility, p. 137
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