War and Peace

by Leo Tolstoy

Power is the collective will of the masses transferred to rulers selected by open or tacit consent.

In 1808 was the will of the Conference of the Rhine transferred to Napoleon? Was the will of the mass of the Russian people transferred to Napoleon in 1809 when our army allied itself with the French and went to war with Austria?

If we combine these two different kinds of history, as most modern historians do, all we shall get is the history of monarchs and writers instead of a history of the lives of nations.

This theory has an air of infallibility, for one good reason: the act of transferring the popular will can never be verified, because it has never existed.

Which is to say that power is a word with a meaning we cannot understand.

experience tells him that power is not just a word; it is something that actually exists.

Without allowing for divine intervention in human affairs, we cannot accept power as an actual cause of events.

Our false impression that an order preceding an event is the cause of it is due to the fact that when an event has occurred and one or two orders out of a thousand issued have been carried out (the ones that happen to correspond with events), we forget those that were not carried out because they never could have been.

no command is ever the cause of an event, though a definite dependency exists between the two.

murdering millions in Russia in order to take England down a peg or two.

(1) Power is a relationship between a given person and other persons by which the less directly a person participates in a collective enterprise the more involved he is in expressing opinions and theories about it and providing justification for it. (2) The movement of peoples is determined not as historians have supposed, by the exercise of power, or the intellect, or both together, but by the actions of all involved; all the people who come together in such a way that those who participate most directly in the activity assume the least responsibility for it, and vice versa.

You tell me I’m not free. But I have just raised my arm and put it down again.

Every man, savage or sage, despite the irrefutable evidence provided by reason and experience that there is no possibility of two different courses of action emerging from exactly the same circumstances, still feels that without this nonsensical concept (the very essence of freedom) he cannot conceive of life.

To imagine a man without freedom is impossible except as a man deprived of life.

All human actions are subject to universal and immutable laws which can be expressed in statistics.

that most powerful weapon of ignorance, the spread of the printed word,

There is no soul and no free will, because the life of man is expressed in muscular movements, and muscular movements are conditioned by activity in the nervous system. There is no soul and no free will, because at some unknown period of time we descended from the apes. This is what they are saying, writing and printing, and it never even crosses their mind that thousands of years ago all religions and all thinkers were ready to acknowledge – in fact, they have never denied it – the very law of necessity which they are now trying so hard to prove by physiology and comparative zoology.

in the frog, the rabbit, and the monkey we can observe nothing but muscular and nervous activity, whereas in man we have muscular and nervous activity plus consciousness.

it never occurs to anybody nowadays that the renewal of the European world depended on an idea plucked out of the air by Attila the Hun.

because once there is no free will, there is no man.

Only by bringing them together again do we arrive at a clear concept of human life.

the force of gravity, intrinsically unintelligible despite being sensed by everyone,

is the same with history: what we know, we call the laws of necessity; what we don’t know, we call free will.

In the first case, we had to get away from a false sensation of immobility in space and accept movement that we could not feel. In the present case it is no less essential to get away from a false sensation of freedom and accept a dependence that we cannot feel.