"The whole system of our social life, the complicated mechanism of our varied institutions, which all have violence for their aim, bear witness to the degree in which violence is contrary to human nature. Not a single judge will consent to strangle with a rope the man whom he has condemned to death in his court. No one of higher rank will consent to snatch a peasant from his weeping family and shut him up in prison. No general, no soldier, save in obedience to discipline, to his oath, and in time of war, would kill hundreds…and destroy their villages; he would not so much as wound one of them. These things are due to that complicated machinery of Society and the State, which makes it its first business to destroy the feeling of responsibility for such deeds, so that no man shall feel them to be as unnatural as they are."

"Is not what the life of men, men in whose souls has been placed the sense of pity and love, has undergone and is even now undergoing from the stake, wheels, the lash, mutilation, torture, chains, penal labor, the gallows, military executions, solitary confinement, prisons; what women and children endure through war; through periodical revolutions; what some have to suffer in carrying out all these horrors, and others in the attempt to avoid them, is not this a dreadful dream? When we feel the teaching of Jesus, we see that this world of ours (not the world given by God for man to be happy in but a world created by men for their own ruin) is a dream, the wildest and most terrible of dreams, the wandering of a madman's mind, from which we need but once to awaken never again to return to its fearful visions."