From Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Russian author, Hadji Murad (1912):
That debauchery was not a good thing in a married man did not even occur to him [Tsar Nicholas I], and he would have been very surprised if anyone had condemned him for it. But, even though he was convinced that he had acted as he ought, he was left with some sort of unpleasant aftertaste, and, to stifle that feeling, he began thinking about something that always soothed him: about what a great man he was.
From Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Russian writer, Resurrection (1899):
Imagine a problem in psychology: to find a way of getting people in our day and age – Christians, humanitarians, nice, kind people – to commit the most heinous crimes without feeling any guilt. There is only one solution – doing just what we do now: you make them governors, superintendents, officers or policemen, a process which, first of all, presupposes acceptance of something that goes by the name of government service and allows people to be treated like inanimate objects, precluding any humane or brotherly relationships, and, secondly, ensures that people working for this government service must be so interdependent that responsibility for any consequences of the way they treat people never devolves on any one of them individually.
