What Leo Tolstoy thinks about war

@leo-tolstoy · 40 positions

Russian novelist and moral philosopher (1828 to 1910); author of War and Peace and The Kingdom of God Is Within You.

Leo Tolstoy did not write this page.

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Only Leo Tolstoy on war. See everyone on war

3 dated positions, c. 1893–1894 to c. 1897–1898, in their own words. Our reading of what Leo Tolstoy has said — not written or endorsed by them.

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1. c. 1897–1898

   Our readingAlmost no human activity except the military consumes as much labour as art

   energy

   Their wordsHundreds of thousands of workmen,—carpenters, masons, painters, joiners, paperhangers, tailors, hairdressers, jewellers, moulders, type-setters,—spend their whole lives in hard labour to satisfy the demands of art, so that hardly any other department of human activity, except the military, consumes so much energy as this.

   ↗What Is Art? (1897-1898; Aylmer Maude translation)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book

3. c. 1893–1894

   Our readingUniversal military service destroys the benefits of the social order it is meant to maintain

   Their wordsUniversal military service may be compared to the efforts of a man to prop up his falling house who so surrounds it and fills it with props and buttresses and planks and scaffolding that he manages to keep the house standing only by making it impossible to live in it. In the same way universal military service destroys all the benefits of the social order of life which it is employed to maintain.

   ↗The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894; Constance Garnett translation)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book

5. c. 1893–1894

   Our readingMost people submit to military service through a kind of hypnosis, not sober calculation

   Their wordsIf the majority of men choose to submit rather than to refuse, it is not the result of sober balancing of advantages and disadvantages, but because they are induced by a kind of hypnotizing process practiced upon them.

   ↗The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894; Constance Garnett translation)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book