Sunday, December 30, 2007
Tolstoy on Bush
From War and Peace, Vol. III, Part 3, §XXV, p. 891 in the new Pevear and Volokhonsky translation:
As long as the world has existed and people have been killing each other, no one man has ever committed a crime upon his own kind without calming himself with this same thought. This thought was le bien publique, the supposed good of other people.
For a man not gripped by passion, that good is never known; but the man who commits the crime always knows for certain what that good consists in.
