“It was only at her prayers that she felt able to think calmly and clearly either of Prince
Andrey or Anatole, with a sense that her feelings for them were as nothing compared with her
feel of worship and awe of God.”
“My field was God’s earth. Wherever I ploughed, there was my field. Land was free. It was a
thing no man called his own. Labor was the only thing men called their own.”
“Please remember that you don’t have to be like someone else to be acceptable. The world’s standards are not God’s. The world may say you need to be like this person or that person, but God’s will is that you be yourself.
“Why does an apple fall when it is ripe? Is it brought down by the force of gravity? Is it
because its stalk withers? Because it is dried by the sun, because it grows too heavy, or
because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it? None of these is the cause.... Every
action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own freewill is in the historical sense not
free at all but is bound up with the whole course of history and preordained from all eternity.”
“The tendencies we have mentioned are something new for America. They arose when, under the influence of the two World Wars and the consequent concentration of all forces on a military goal, a predominantly military mentality developed, which with the almost sudden victory became even more accentuated. The characteristic feature of this mentality is that people place the importance of what Bertrand Russell so tellingly terms “naked power” far above all other factors which affect the relations between peoples. The Germans, misled by Bismarck’s successes in particular, underwent just such a transformation of their mentality—in consequence of which they were entirely ruined in less than a hundred years. I must frankly confess that the foreign policy of the United States since the termination of hostilities has reminded me, sometimes irresistibly, of the attitude of Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II, and I know that, independent of me, this analogy has most painfully occurred to others as well. It is characteristic of the military mentality that non-human factors (atom bombs, strategic bases, weapons of all sorts, the possession of raw materials, etc.) are held essential, while the human being, his desires and thoughts—in short, the psychological factors—are considered as unimportant and secondary. Herein lies a certain resemblance to Marxism, at least insofar as its theoretical side alone is kept in view. The individual is degraded to a mere instrument; he becomes “human materiel.” The normal ends of human aspiration vanish with such a viewpoint. Instead, the military mentality raises “naked power” as a goal in itself—one of the strangest illusions to which men can succumb.”
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