Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev

1749-1802

"O, man... your mind is not destined for destruction with your body. Your goal is felicity and perfection. Endowed as you are with varied qualities, use them in a way commensurate with your goal, but beware of using them in for ill. Every abuse contains its own punishement. Your felicity and your misfortune are within yourself... You determine your future with the present. And believe, I repeat, believe: eternity is not a dream."

Peter Yakovlevich Chaadaev

1794-1856

"One of the worst features of our peculiar civilization is that we have not yet discovered truths that have elsewhere become truisms, even among nations that in many respects are far less advanced than we are. It is the result of our never having walked hand in hand with other nations; we belong to none of the great families of [hu]mankind; we are neither of the West nor of the East, and we possess the traditions of neither. Somehow divorced from time and space, the universal education of mankind has not touched upon us."

Ivan Vasilyevich Kireevsky

1749-1802

"The first condition for the elevation of reason is that man should strive to gather into one indivisible whole all his separate forces, which in ordinary condition of man are in a state of incompleteness and contradictions... that he should constantly seek in the depth of his soul that inner root of understanding where all the separate forces merge into one living and whole vision of the mind"

Alexis Stepanovich Khomyakov

1804-1860

"Romanism began at the moment it placed the independence of individual or regional opinion above the ecumenical unity of faith; it was the first to create a heresy of a new type, a heresy against the dogma of the nature of the Church, against her own faith in herself. The Reform was only the continuation of this same heresy under another name."

Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky

1811-1848

"The fate of the subject, the individual, the person is of more importance to me than the fate of the whole world… Even if I succeeded in climbing to the top of the ladder [of progress], I would still demand… an account of all the victims of the conditions of life and history, of chance, superstition, the Inquisition… I do not want happiness, so long as I am not reassured as to the fate of my blood brothers..."

Alexander Ivanovich Herzen

1812-1870

"If only people wanted to save themselves instead of saving the world, how much they would do for the salvation of the world and the liberation of humanity!.. The submission of the individual to society, to the people, to humanity, to the Idea, is merely a continuation of human sacrifice, of the immolation of the lamb to pacify God, of the crucifixion of the innocent for the sake of the guilty."

Michael Alexandrovich Bakunin

1814-1876

"… if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him… Therefore, of God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty - by ceasing to exist."

Nicholas Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky

1828-1889

"As in human life as a whole, all the diverse phenomena in the sphere of human motives and conduct spring from one nature, are governed by one law... In general, it is necessary only to examine more closely an action or a feeling that seems to be altruistic to see that all of them are based on the thought of personal interest, personal gratification, personal benefit; they are based on the feeling that is called egoism."

Dmitry Ivanovich Pisarev

1840-1868

"Aesthetics and realism are irreconcilably hostile to each other, and realism must radically destroy aesthetics... aesthetics is the stubbornest element of intellectual stagnation and the surest enemy of rational progress. The vacuity of aesthetic judgments consists in the fact that they are pronounced not as the result of reflection but through inspiration... But why [something] is liked or not liked... no aesthetician will ever explain to you."

Peter Lavrovich Lavrov

1823-1900

"How nuch of the evil contained in the process to which we give the high-sounding title of 'historical progress' is unavoidable and natural? To what extent did our ancestors - who provided us, the civilized minority, with the chance to enjoy the advantages of this progress - needlessly increase and prolong the sufferings and toil of the majority which has never enjoyed the advantages of progress? In what instances may the responsibility for this evil fall also upon us, in the eyes of future generations?"

Nicholas Konstantinovich Mikhailovsky

1842-1904

"In an organism it is the whole that experiences pain and pleasure, not the parts; in society it is the parts that experience pain and pleasure, not the whole… this [is a] fundamental difference, connected with the fundamental difference between the physiological and the social division of labor, which in its turn is connected with the equally fundamental difference between organic and social evolution. "

Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy

1828-1910

"The whole true significance of the Christian doctrine... consists in this: the essence of human life is the conscious, progressive manifestation of that principle or source of everything, the manifestation of which in us is sgnified by love; thus love is the essence of human life and the supreme law that should guide us... Whereas the Christian teaching in its true sense, recognizing the law of love as supreme and its application to life as not admitting of any exceptions, destroys all violence by this recognition, and consequently cannot but reject every world order based on violence"

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

1821-1881

"I don't want harmony. From love of humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket."

Constantine Nikolaevich Leontyev

1831-1891

"...the homogeneity of individuals, institutins, fashions, cities, and in general of cultured ideals and forms is spreading more and more, reducing everybody and everything to the very simple, average, so-called 'bourgeois' type of the Western European. [The] interfusion or mixing of homogeneous component parts... leads not to a greater solidarity but to ruin and death (of states, of culture).These universal goods do not even have moral plausibility; for the highest morality is known only in deprivation, in conflict, amd in danger. Deny a man the possibility of a lofty personal moral conflict, and you deny morals to all mankind..."

Vasily Vasilyevich Rozanov

1856-1919

"The Apocalypse is not a Christian book. It is an anti-Christian book - no doubt about it. The 'Christ', with the 'sword issuing from his mouth' and with feet 'like gems of jasper and sardonyx' of whom it speaks... has nothing in common with the Christ of the Gospels...[The Apocalpse] is about the impotence of Christianity to organize human life, to give us an 'earthly life' - specifically earthly, difficult and sad...The end of the world and of humanity will occur because the Gospel is a book marked by exhaustion."

Nicholas Fyodorovich Fyodorov

1828-1903

"The raising of the dead is the full expression of maturity, it is the departure from school, and it requires a society of independent persons, of sons, who are participating in the common task of raising the forefathers from the dead. The task of the fathers or parents ends with the end of upbringing, and then begins the task of the sons, of those who restore life."

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

1831-1891

"The aim of this work [The Secret Doctrine] may be thus stated: to show that Nature is not 'a fortuitous concurrence of atoms', and to assign to man his rightful place in the scheme of the Universe; to rescue from degradation the archaic truths which are the basis of all religions; and to uncover, to some extent, the fundamental unity from which they all spring; finally, to show that the occult side of Nature has never been approached by the Science of modern civilization."

Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov

1853-1900

"... the absolute actualizes the good in beauty, through truth. The three ideas, or universal unities, since they are only different aspects or positings of a single [subject], form, in their interpenetration, a new concrete unity, which constitutes the perfect actualization of the divine content, the integral totality of the absolute essence, the realization of God as total-unity..."

Nicholas Alexandrovich Berdyaev

1874-1948

"Freedom is a primordial source and condition of existence, and, characteristically, I have put Freedom, rather than Being, at the basis of my philosophy…The mystery of the world abides in freedom… Freedom alone should be recognized as possessing a sacred quality, whilst all the other things to which a sacred character has been assigned by men since history began ought to be made null and void."

Leon Shestov

1866-1938

"The Nothingness which the tempter showed to the first man awakened in him the fear of the omnipotent, unlimited will of the Creator, and, seeking to protect himself from God, Adam ran to knowledge, to the eternal, uncreated truths. And in this respect nothing has changed. We are afraid of God. We see our salvation in knowledge. "