The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

Allowing Russians to vote in free elections, thought Ilyin, was like allowing embryos to choose their species

Fascism begins not with an assessment of what is within, but from a rejection of what is without.

May your prayer be a sword and your sword be a prayer!”

To speak of Ukraine was to be a mortal enemy of Russia. Ilyin took for granted that a post-Soviet Russia would include Ukraine

The nation, “pure and objective,” was what the philosopher saw when he blinded himself

more. Life is nasty, brutish, and short; the pleasure of life is that it can be made nastier, more brutish, and shorter for others

Our very individuality only proves that the world is flawed: “the empirical fragmentation of human existence is an incorrect, a transitory, and a metaphysically untrue condition of the world.”

According to Ilyin, communism had been inflicted upon innocent Russia by the decadent West

If we wish to have a better account of good and evil, we will have to resuscitate history

Europeans and Americans wasted time by asking whether an invasion had taken place, whether Ukraine was a country, and whether it had somehow deserved to be invaded. This revealed a capacious vulnerability that Russia soon exploited within the European Union and the United States