One of the signs that enable us to recognize the few great men who have lived in the world is this: they are nearly always able to state in clear, si… - Robert Hunter

To those... who see in certain underlying economic forces, the source of nearly all of our distressing social evils, individual hatred and malice can make in reality no appeal.

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.

In recent centuries the only near spiritual relative of Tolstoy is the English poet, who in the fourteenth century, in the form of Piers Plowman, preached religious ideas so strikingly like those of Tolstoy. They are both individualists and they seek individual, not social, regeneration. ...Both point to the simple toiling God-fearing peasant as one expressing the ideal of the Christian life and service.