The last paragraph in Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace et al

"In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious."

So let us ease into our acquaintance with the great Russian master through his short story, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” The story can be synopsized easily enough:

After slowly accumulating more and more property, a greedy Russian named Pahom hears that the Bashkirs, a minority race in Russia, are practically giving their land away. He decides to visit them and they offer him as much land as he wants, provided he can walk its perimeter in one day. Pahom agrees and goes out on his trek, but when the sun starts to set, he finds he has walked too far. Running back, Pahom collapses at the starting point just as the sun disappears behind the horizon. The Bashkirs try to congratulate him, only to find him dead. In answer to the question posed in the title, the Bashkirs bury him in a hole six feet long by two feet wide.

"Tolstoy's life has been devoted to replacing the method of violence for removing tyranny or securing reform by the method of non resistance to evil. He would meet hatred expressed in violence by love expressed in self suffering. He admits of no exception to whittle down this great and divine law of love. He applies it to all the problems that trouble mankind."
-Mohandas Gandhi
(19 November 1909) Introduction to the publication of Tolstoy's A Letter to a Hindu (1909)

"The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without Authority, there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution. But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require the protection of governmental power…There can be only one permanent revolution - a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man."

-Leo Tolstoy