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"...And there really are men who believe in this, who spend their time in promoting Leagues of Peace, in delivering addresses, and in writing books; and of course the governments sympathize with it all, pretending that they approve of it; just as they pretend to support temperance, while they actually derive the larger part of their income from intemperance; just as they pretend to maintain liberty of the constitution, when it is the absence of liberty to which they owe their power; just as they pretend to care for the improvement of the laboring classes, while on oppression of the workman rest the very foundations of the State; just as they pretend to uphold Christianity, when Christianity is subversive of every government."
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"If you have to say or do something controversial, aim so that people will hate that they love it and not love that they hate it."

"If a politician obtained a great wealth after he has been elected, his being an immoral corrupt man is not a possibility but it is a self-evident reality!"

"If a country is not governed well, all sort of disasters will become a routine of that country!"

"Communism...muat of necessity be a saddening process for anyone who has ever tasted the intellectual pleasures of the world we live in."

"Some politicians are much noisier than the dogs! Just like teaching a dog how to hush, public must likewise teach those politicians to shush!"
Explore more quotes by Leo Tolstoy

"Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity."

"He saw either death or the approach of it everywhere. But his undertaking now occupied him all the more. He had to live his life to the end, until death came. Darkness covered everything for him; but precisely because of this darkness he felt that his undertaking was the only guiding thread in this darkness, and he seized it and held on to it with all his remaining strength."

"What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the world!"

"Our life has been joined, not by man, but by God. That union can only be severed by a crime, and a crime of that nature brings its own chastisement."

"The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life."

"The very same thing, don't you see, may be looked at tragically, and turned into a misery, or it may be looked at simply and even humorously. Possibly you are inclined to look at things too tragically."

"Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself."

"While I doubted, I had hope; but now there is no hope left and all the same I doubt everything."

"But to us of a later generation...it is inconceivable that millions of Christian men should have killed and tortured each other, because Napoleon was ambitious, Alexander firm, English policy crafty, and the Duke of Oldenburg hardly treated. We cannot grasp the connections between these circumstances and the bare fact of murder and violence, nor why the duke's wrongs should induce thousands of men from the other side of Europe to pillage and murder the inhabitants of the Smolensk and Moscow provinces and to be slaughtered by them."
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