Violence Quotes by Leo Tolstoy

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

— Leo Tolstoy

Art should cause violence to be set aside and it is only art that can accomplish this.

— Leo Tolstoy

I am obliged to renounce violence, and abstain from it altogether.

— Leo Tolstoy

Why does man have reason if he can only be influenced by violence?

— Leo Tolstoy

Physical violence is the basis of authority.

— Leo Tolstoy

Men are so accustomed to maintaining external order by violence that they cannot conceive of life being possible without violence.

— Leo Tolstoy

Violence produces only something resembling justice, but it distances people from the possibility of living justly, without violence.

— Leo Tolstoy

Every reform by violence is to be deprecated, because it does little to correct the evil while men remain as they are,…

— Leo Tolstoy

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to…

— Leo Tolstoy

“Believing that one person can improve another person’s life through force is a mistake. Violence”

— Leo Tolstoy

The struggle with evil by means of violence is the same as an attempt to stop a cloud, in order that there…

— Leo Tolstoy

Government is violence, Christianity is meekness, non-resistance, love. And, therefore, government cannot be Christian, and a man who wishes to be a…

— Leo Tolstoy

To destroy governmental violence, only one thing is needed: It is that people should understand that the feeling of patriotism, which alone…

— Leo Tolstoy

In former times the chief method of justifying the use of violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming…

— Leo Tolstoy

The improvement of life was only accomplished to the extent to which it was based on a change of consciousness, that is,…

— Leo Tolstoy

The law of violence is not a law, but a simple fact which can only be a law when it does not…

— Leo Tolstoy

I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the…

— Leo Tolstoy

It is horrible! It is not the suffering and the death of the animals that is horrible, but the fact that the…

— Leo Tolstoy

The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without authority, there could…

— Leo Tolstoy

Understand then all of you, especially the young, that to want to impose an imaginary state of government on others by violence…

— Leo Tolstoy

As soon as men live entirely in accord with the law of love natural to their hearts and now revealed to them,…

— Leo Tolstoy

To us, it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was…

— Leo Tolstoy

People continued regardless of all that leads man forward to try to unite the incompatibles:;: the virtue of love, and what is…

— Leo Tolstoy

“[from Some words about 'War and Peace' ] In those days also people loved, envied, sought truth and virtue, and where carried…

— Leo Tolstoy