Leo Tolstoy

“ And the business is performed by unhappy, deluded, perverted and despised men, who have nothing left them but to soap the cords well, that they may grip the necks without fail, then to get well drunk on poison sold them by these same enlightened upper-class people, in order more quickly and fully to forget their souls and their quality as men. A doctor makes his round of the bodies, feels them, and reports to those in authority that the business has been done properly; all twelve are certainly dead. ”

“ Twelve of those by whose labour we live, the very men whom we have depraved and are still depraving by every means in our power - from the poison of vodka to the terrible falsehood of a creed we do not ourselves believe in, but impose on them with all our might - twelve of these men, strangled with cords by those whom they feed and clothe and house, and who have depraved and still continue to deprave them. ”

“ All this is carefully arranged and planned by learned and enlightened people of the upper class. They arrange to do these things secretly at daybreak so that no one shall see them done, and they arrange that the responsibility for these iniquities shall be so subdivided among those who commit them that each may think and say that it is not he who is responsible for them. They arrange to seek out the most depraved and unfortunate of men and, while obliging them to do this business planned and approved by themselves, still keep up an appearance of abhorring those who do it. ”