8 Leo Tolstoy Quotes on Violence

Leo Tolstoy quotes on violence

48. The Quakers sent me books, from which I learnt how they had, years ago, established beyond doubt the duty for a Christian of fulfilling the command of non-resistance to evil by force, and had exposed the error of the Church's teaching in allowing war and capital punishment.

84. It was taught that this highest morality was only applicable to private life ...but that in public life all forms of violence, such as imprisonment, executions, and wars -might be used for the protection of the majority against a minority of evildoers, though such means were diametrically opposed to any vestige of love.

85. ...people continued ...to try to unite the incompatibles: the virtue of love, and what is opposed to love, namely, the restraining of evil by violence. And such a teaching, despite its inner contradiction, was so firmly established that the very people who recognize love as a virtue accept as lawful at the same time an order of life based on violence and allowing men not merely to torture but even to kill one another.

92. If the people of India are enslaved by violence it is only because they themselves live and have lived by violence, and do not recognize the eternal law of love inherent in humanity.

94. Do not resist the evil-doer and take no part in doing so, either in the violent deeds of the administration, in the law courts, the collection of taxes, or above all in soldiering, and no one in the world will be able to enslave you.

97. ...the inherent contradiction of human life has now reached an extreme degree of tension: on the one side there is the consciousness of the beneficence of the law of love, and on the other the existing order of life... an empty, anxious, restless, and troubled mode of life, conflicting as it does with the law of love and built on the use of violence. This contradiction must be faced, and the solution... has dwelt in the hearts of men from remote antiquity: the truth that the law of love is in accord with the nature of man.

118. Laws are rules, made by people who govern by means of organized violence, for non-compliance with which the non-complier is subjected to blows, to loss of liberty, or even to being murdered.

135. Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.