Robert Hunter Quotes

Tolstoy set for himself the highest ideal that has ever been given to the world, and Tolstoy failed. He has had pointed at him fingers of scorn, and very unworthy fingers they were, but who has the right to judge Tolstoy for failure to live perfectly a life that has for two thousand years been an unattainable ideal to millions of earnest souls?

Although Tolstoy in his protest recognized the fact that he was bound up with all others, neither this nor the knowledge of his individual helplessness induced him to work with others in order to change any part of the infamous governmental system of Russia.

To continue in poverty for any long period means in the end the loss of the power of doing work, and to be unable to work means in the end pauperism.

The peasants [of Russia], only a short time free from serfdom, are wretchedly poor. ...The people in that country are about three-fourths illiterate, and the vast majority of the laboring people are peasants. Floggings are of daily occurrence, and the fatalism common to all backward peoples is widespread in Russia.

Those who are in poverty may be able to get a bare sustenance but they are not able to obtain those necessaries which will permit them to maintain a state of physical efficiency.

He [Tolstoy] seems to have felt somehow that social evolution was standing in his way. He did not like the division of labor. He hated all forms of commerce and trade. The State was an abomination in his eyes. He wanted it abolished and with it, indeed, all of modern society based upon machine industry. With Rousseau, he would go back to the primitive state.

Isaiah prophesied the coming of a revolution which would make men more precious than gold, and that a new nation would arise, wherein everyone should help his neighbor.

In the time of Jesus almost everybody worked in small shops or on the land and then sold or bartered their own products in the towns. There were no vast industrial centers, no great factories, no steam power or electricity. Everyone knew his neighbor by name. There was no highly developed division of labor, nor were there great extremes of wealth and poverty. Such economic conditions are ideal—or at least as nearly ideal as they can ever be—for the spread of Christian communism. And so they are still in many parts of Russia.

Whatever in the gospel will not interfere with what we like to do, or feel we must do, we gladly believe; and to the rest we close our eyes. Most of us do this half-unconsciously, perhaps, but in our innermost selves we can hardly help knowing that we are not Christians, and that there is in the gospel something fundamental—a vital message, an essence—which we do not wish to understand.

The world cannot utterly ignore men who lay down their lives for any cause. Men may write and agitate, they may scream never so shrilly about the wrongs of the world, but when they go forth to fight single-handed and to die for what they preach, they have at least earned the right to demand of society an inquiry.

St. Paul earned his living most of the time by hard labor and constantly reminded his converts that they must not defraud each other, but love one another and work with their own hands. The same rule of life is applied by the laws governing the early monastic orders.

The poor did not hear such doctrines gladly and they were not at all disposed to follow the teaching of Tolstoy. ...such teaching was no more acceptable to the peasants than some of Tolstoy's other views were to his wife and to the Government. ...The more enlightened of their leaders looked upon him as a reactionary, standing in the way of the people's progress.

All great men have universally deplored that nation wherein "wealth accumulates and men decay." They are, of course, right; but until society manifests some desire to know the extent of the misery in which men decay—not until then may we hope for anything more than a petty individual dealing with a question mainly social.

Both inside and outside their colonies, the Tolstoyans proved rather a source of amusement to others than an inspiration and a light, and those who scoffed at Tolstoy's followers greatly enjoyed relating stories of their inconsistencies. ..."I remember," writes Maude, "how much amusement was caused by the conduct of one of his closest followers... who ceased to use money, but allowed his wife to sign his cheques and his secretary to accompany him to the station to buy him railway tickets."

If one's point of view is that of the anarchist, he is led inevitably to make his war upon individuals. The more sensitive and sincere he is, the more bitter and implacable becomes that war. If one's point of view is based on what is now called the economic interpretation of history, one is emancipated, in so far as that is possible for emotional beings, from all hatred of individuals, and one sees before him only the necessity of readjusting the economic basis of our common life in order to achieve a more nearly perfect social order.