Powerless to prevent those about him from serving him, he resented even to the last that he must attended to and cared for despite his hatred of such things, and that even after turning away from temptation, he was not permitted to die as a peasant, as he had been unable to live as a peasant. Almost at the point of death, he sat up in bed and shouted, as doctors, attendants, and friends crowded about him: "This is the end... I give you only this advice... besides Leo Tolstoy, there are many other people in the world, and you attend only to this Leo...!"
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Robert Hunter in "Why We Fail as Christians" (1919), Ch. 3 : How Tolstoy Tried To Live The Truth, p. 57Leo Tolstoy
Who keeps the tavern and serves up the drinks? The peasant. Who squanders and drinks up money belonging to the peasant commune, the school, the church? The peasant. Who would steal from his neighbor, commit arson, and falsely denounce another for a bottle of vodka? The peasant.
Anton Chekhov
"I'm not too interested in these swan songs I'm continuing to hear. I'm just Mike. I'm a peasant. I'm here to entertain the people. I'm no elite person. At one stage in my life, I had my little jewelry and all my little girlfriends and my big cars and things. At one point, I thought life was about acquiring things. But as a I get older life is totally about losing everything. As life goes on, we lose more than we acquire. I don't want the finest girl in the world anymore. I'm just trying to stay balanced, basically."
Mike Tyson
I would rather have been a French peasant and worn wooden shoes; I would rather have lived in a hut, with a vine growing over the door and the grapes growing and ripening in the autumn sun; I would rather have been that peasant, with my wife by my side and my children upon my knees, twining their arms of affection about me; I would rather have been that poor French peasant and gone down at last to the eternal promiscuity of the dust, followed by those who loved me; I would a thousand times rather have been that French peasant than that imperial personative of force and murder; and so I would —ten thousand thousand times.
Robert G. Ingersoll
You can look at a slum or peasant village...but it is only by entering into the world—by living in it—that you begin to understand what it is like to be powerless, to be like Christ.
Penny Lernoux
By destroying the peasant economy and driving the peasant from the country to the town, the famine creates a proletariat... Furthermore the famine can and should be a progressive factor not only economically. It will force the peasant to reflect on the bases of the capitalist system, demolish faith in the tsar and tsarism, and consequently in due course make the victory of the revolution easier... Psychologically all this talk about feeding the starving and so on essentially reflects the usual sugary sentimentality of our intelligentsia.
Vladimir Lenin
Tolstoy, Leo
Tomjanovich, Rudy
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