graf Leo Tolstoy

“ To attain the first end, the Congress turns to the teachers of history, to the women, and to the clergy with the advice that the evil of war and the good of peace be preached to men on every third Sunday in December; to attain the second end, the Congress addresses the governments, proposing that they disarm and substitute arbitration for war.
To preach the evil of war and the good of peace to men! But the evil of war and the good of peace are so well known to men that, so long as we have known men, the best greeting has been, "Peace be with you." ”

“ And let public opinion change, and the inner structure of men's life, which torments and pains them, will be changed without any effort. It is really a shame to think how little is needed for all men to be freed from all those calamities which now oppress them; they need only stop lying. Let men only not succumb to that lie which is inculcated on them, let them not say what they do not think or feel, and immediately a revolution will take place in the whole structure of our life, such as the revolutionists will not accomplish in centuries, even if all the power were in their hands. ”

“ War! To fight! To butcher! To massacre people! And to-day, at our period of the world, with our civilization, with the expansion of science and the degree of philosophy which we deem the human genius to have attained, we have schools in which they teach how to kill; to kill at a great distance, with perfection, a lot of people at the same time,—to kill poor innocent fellows, who have the care of a family and are under no judicial sentence. ”

“ The meaning of these words was always one and the same: "We love one another tenderly, we are in transport, because we have so suddenly fallen in love with one another. Our aim is not war and not revanche, and not the return of provinces taken, but only peace, the benefaction of peace, the security of peace, the rest and peace of Europe. Long live the Emperor of Russia and the empress,—we love them and we love peace. Long live the president of the republic and his wife,—we love them, too, and we love peace. Long live France, Russia, their fleets, and their armies. ”

“ Patriotism may have been a virtue in the ancient world, when it demanded of man that he serve the highest ideal accessible to him at the time,—the ideal of his country. But how can patriotism be a virtue in our time, when it demands of men what is directly opposed to what forms the ideal of our religion and morality,—not the recognition of the equality and brotherhood of all men, but the recognition of one state and nationality as predominating over all the others. This sentiment is in our time not only not a virtue, but unquestionably a vice ”

“ It is better for one man to perish, than that a whole nation should perish, you say, like Caiaphas, and you sign one, two, three death-warrants, load your gun for that man who is to perish for the common good, put him in prison, take away his property. You say that you do these cruel things, because you feel yourself to be a man of society, the state, under obligation to serve it and to carry out its laws, a landowner, a judge, an emperor, a soldier. ”

“ Not only the greatest sages of the world, the teachers of humanity, Plato, Aristotle, justified the existence of slaves and proved the legality of it, but even three centuries ago men who wrote of the imaginary society of the future, of Utopia, could not imagine it without slaves.
The men of antiquity, and even of the Middle Ages, believed, believed firmly, that men are not equal, that only the Persians, only the Greeks, only the Romans, only the French were real men. But those men who in our time champion aristocratism and patriotism do not believe, cannot believe, in what they say. ”

“ But what produces war is the desire for an exclusive good for one's own nation,—what is called patriotism. And so to abolish war, it is necessary to abolish patriotism, and to abolish patriotism, it is necessary first to become convinced that it is an evil, and that it is hard to do. Tell people that war is bad, and they will laugh at you: who does not know that? Tell them that patriotism is bad, and the majority of people will agree with you, but with a small proviso. "Yes, bad patriotism is bad, but there is also another patriotism, the one we adhere to." ”

“ To punish them for such refusals, a government must itself irretrievably renounce reason and the good; whereas it assures men that it serves only in the name of reason and of the good.
What are the governments to do against these men?
Indeed, the governments can kill off, for ever shut up in prisons and at hard labour their enemies, who wish by the exercise of violence to overthrow them; they can bury in gold half of the men, such as they may need, and bribe them; they can subject to themselves millions of armed men, who will be ready to destroy all the enemies of the governments. ”

“ The working masses, the great majority of people, suffering from the constant, all-absorbing, senseless, dawnless labour and sufferings, suffer most of all from the consciousness of the crying contradiction between what exists and what ought to be, as the result of everything which is professed by them and by those who have placed them in this position and maintain them in it.
They know that they are in slavery, and are perishing in want and darkness, in order to serve the lust of the minority, which keeps them in slavery. ”

“ Does one not feel here the presence of the God of love and brotherhood, the presence of something higher, something ideal, which descends upon men only in lofty moments? The heart is so full of something beautiful and pure and exalted, that the pen is not able to express it all. ”

“ If men only knew in what their mighty, all-conquering force consists, the peace for which men have always wished, not the one which is obtained by means of diplomatic treaties, journeys of emperors and kings from one city to another, dinners, speeches, fortresses, cannon, dynamite, and melenite, but the one which is obtained not by the exhaustion of the masses by taxes, not by tearing the flower of the population away from work and debauching them, but by the free profession of the truth by every separate individual, would long ago have come to us. ”

“ But we know how laws are made; we have all been behind the scenes; we all know that laws are the results of greed, deception, the struggle of parties,—that in them there is and there can be no true justice. And so the men of our time cannot believe that obedience to civil or political laws would satisfy the demands of the rationality of human nature. Men have known for a long time that it is not sensible to obey a law of the correctness of which there can be any doubt, and so they cannot help but suffer, if they obey a law the rationality and obligatoriness of which they do not acknowledge. ”

“ It is as though at the door of education stood a snare, into which inevitably fall those who in one way or another leave the masses that are absorbed in labour.
At first, as one comes to understand the cruelty of the deception, there involuntarily rises an indignation against those who for their personal, selfish, ambitious advantage produce this cruel deception, which destroys, not only men's bodies, but also their souls, and one feels like showing up these cruel deceivers. ”

“ The hypocrisy of our time, which is supported from two sides, by the quasi-religion and the quasi-science, has reached such a point that, if we did not live in the midst of it, we should not be able to believe that men could reach such a degree of self-deception. The people have in our time reached the remarkable state when their hearts are so hardened that they look and do not see, that they listen and do not hear or understand.
Men have long been living a life which is contrary to their consciousness. If it were not for hypocrisy, they would not be able to live this life. ”

“ All these salaried shouters, these ambitious exploiters of the evil passions of the masses and the poor in spirit, who are deceived by the sonority of words, have to such an extent envenomed the national hatreds that the war of to-morrow will stake the existence of a race: one of the elements which have constituted the modern world is menaced,—he who will be vanquished must disappear morally,—and, whatever it be, we shall see a force annihilated, as if there were one too many for the good! ”

“ Better men are absolutely unable to seize the power and to retain it.
In order to get the power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness, but with qualities which are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning, cruelty.
Without self-aggrandizement and debasement of others, without hypocrisy, deceit, prisons, fortresses, executions, murders, a power can neither arise nor maintain itself.
"If the power of state be abolished, the more evil men will rule over the less evil ones," say the defenders of the state. ”

“ It would seem that the man who frankly expressed his thought would remain alone, while in reality it happens that all those men, or the majority of them, have long been thinking and feeling the same, but have not expressed their thought. And what yesterday was the new opinion of one man, to-day becomes the common opinion of all men. And as soon as this opinion has established itself, men's acts begin to change imperceptibly, slowly, but irresistibly.
For, as it is, every free man says to himself: "What can I do against all this sea of evil and deceit, which inundates me? ”

“ He expresses frankly and with the coarsest of words all the horror of the crime for which the men who enter into military service are prepared, all that abyss of degradation which they reach, when they promise obedience. Like a bold hypnotizer, he tests the degree of the hypnotized man's sleep: he puts the glowing iron to his body, the body sizzles and smokes, but the hypnotized man does not wake. ”

“ He himself really does nothing,—it only seems to him that he is doing something, but in reality all those things which it seems to him he is doing are done through him by a higher power, and he is not the creator of life, but its slave; but in placing his life in the recognition and profession of the truth that is revealed to him, he, by uniting with the source of the universal life, does not do personal, private works, which depend on conditions of space and time, but works which have no causes and themselves form causes of everything else, and have an endless, unlimited significance. ”

“ But who among us are these evil men, from the violence and attacks of whom the state and its army save us? If three, four centuries ago, when men boasted of their military art and their accoutrements, when it was considered a virtue to kill men, there existed such men, there are none now, for no men of the present time use or carry weapons, and all, professing the rules of philanthropy and of compassion for their neighbours, wish the same as we,—the possibility of a calm and peaceful life. There now are no longer those particular violators against whom the state should defend us. ”

“ To enter a country, to kill a man who is defending his home, simply because he wears a blouse and has no cap on his head, to burn the habitations of wretched people who have no bread, to smash the furniture, to steal some of it, to drink the wine which is found in the cellars, to rape the women who are found in the streets, to burn millions of dollars' worth of powder, and to leave behind them misery and the cholera,—this is what is called not to fall into the most hideous materialism. ”

“ Thus it has always been after every revolution, every attempt at a revolution, every plot, every violent change of government. Every struggle only strengthens the means of the enslavement of those who at a given time are in power. ”

“ Indeed, how can we subjugate by force the nations whose whole education, all whose traditions, even religious teaching, leads them to see the highest virtue in a struggle with their enslavers and in striving after liberty? And how are we forcibly to eradicate crimes in the midst of our societies, when what by the governments are considered to be crimes are considered to be virtues by public opinion. It is possible by means of violence to destroy [265] such nations and such men, as is indeed done, but it is impossible to subjugate them. ”

“ Nations have never subjugated other nations by violence alone. If a nation which subjugated another stood on a lower stage of development, there was always repeated the phenomenon that it did not introduce its structure of life by means of violence, but, on the contrary, always submitted to the structure of life which existed in the conquered nation. If a nation, crushed by force, is subjugated or close to subjugation, it is so only through public opinion, and by no means through violence, which, on the contrary, provokes the nation more and more. ”

“ We do not know humanity as an external object,—we do not know its limits. Humanity is a fiction, and it cannot be loved. It would indeed be very convenient, if men could love humanity just as they love the family; it would be very convenient, as the communists talk of doing, to substitute the communal for the competitive tendency of human activity, and the universal for the individual, so that every man may be for all, and all for every man, only there are no motives whatever for it. ”

“ Our whole life is one solid contradiction to everything we know and consider necessary and right. This contradiction is in everything,—in the economic, the political, the international life. As though forgetting what we know, and for a time putting aside what we believe in (we cannot help but believe, because this constitutes our only foundations of life) , we do everything contrary to what our conscience and our common sense demand of us. ”

“ In reality, when we read or contemplate an artistic production by a new author, the fundamental question which arises in our soul is always this: "Well, what kind of a man are you? How do you differ from all other men whom I know, and what new thing can you tell me about the way we ought to look upon our life?" No matter what the artist may represent,—saints, robbers, kings, lackeys,—we seek and see only the artist's soul. ”

“ Just as it is impossible for a man to lift up a mountain, as it is impossible for a good man to kill a child, so it is impossible for a man who lives a Christian life to take part in violence. Of what significance for such a man can be the reflections that for some imaginary good he must do what has become morally impossible for him?
How, then, is a man to act when he sees the obvious harm of following the law of love and the law of non-resistance, which results from it? ”

“ Thus the prediction that the time will come when all men shall be instructed by God, shall stop warring, shall forge the swords into ploughshares and the spears into pruning-hooks, that is, translating into our language, when all the prisons, fortresses, barracks, palaces, churches, shall remain empty, and all the gallows, guns, cannon, shall remain unused, is no longer a dream, but a definite, new form of life, toward which humanity is moving with ever increasing rapidity. ”