“NIHILIST, n. A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoi. The leader of the school is Tolstoi.”

—  Ambrose Bierce

Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "NIHILIST, n. A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoi. The leader of the school is Tolstoi." by Ambrose Bierce?
Ambrose Bierce photo
Ambrose Bierce204
American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabu… 1842–1914

Related quotes

“Is compulsion necessarily a violation of the law of love? To offer an affirmative answer is to deny the validity of all existing governments. This is the position of Tolstoy and other absolute non-resistants. Few readers of these words, however, will agree that anarchy alone is consistent with love.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Individualism and Socialism (1933)

Robert Hunter (author) photo

“Among them exists an immense opportunity for the spread of views such as Tolstoy held, but instead of espousing their cause or seeking in any manner to organize the peasants for cooperative action, he [Tolstoy] invariably taught them submission, nonresistance to evil, loyalty to their masters, and the most extreme form of Christian humility and service.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 69

Albert Camus photo

“A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists.”

Albert Camus book The Rebel

Part 2: Metaphysical Rebellion
The Rebel (1951)

“The motto of his [Robinson Jeffers’s] work is “More! More!”—but as Tolstoy says, “A wee bit omitted, overemphasized, or exaggerated in poetry, and there is no contagion”; and Frost, bearing him out, says magnificently: “A very little of anything goes a long way in a work of art.””

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Fifty Years of American Poetry”, pp. 322–323
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Ambrose Bierce photo

“Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

Lev Mekhlis photo

“Military history, especially Russian, is being studied poorly. We have a lot of unfair ridiculing of the old army despite the fact that we had such notable tsarist army generals as Suvorov, Kutuzov and Bagration who will always remain in the minds of the people as great Russian military leaders and who are revered in the Red Army as a legacy of the finest military traditions of the Russian soldier. There exists a harmful cult of Civil War heroes, while previous Russian military achievements are ignored. All of this leads to the ignoring of concrete historical experience despite the fact that history is the best teacher.”

Lev Mekhlis (1889–1953) Soviet politician

Mekhlis in 1940. Quoted in The People Need a Tsar: The Emergence of National Bolshevism as Stalinist Ideology, 1931-1941, by D. L. Brandenberger & A. M. Dubrovsky, 1998

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher — a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)

Norman Thomas photo

“By every test of civil liberty Russian life is at least as much regimented as in the Fascist countries. The press, schools, and radio are if anything more absolutely controlled. … To strike is as dangerous in Russia as in Germany....”

Norman Thomas (1884–1968) American Presbyterian minister and socialist

As quoted in Norman Thomas: Respectable Rebel, Murray B. Seidler, Syracuse University Press, 1961, p. 187

Ambrose Bierce photo

“Conservative, n. A statesman enamored of existing evils, as opposed to a Liberal, who wants to replace them with others.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker photo

“Where crime exists, force must exist to repress it. Who denies it? Certainly not Liberty; certainly not the Anarchists.”

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939) American journalist and anarchist

Individual Liberty (1926), Anarchism and Crime
Context: Where crime exists, force must exist to repress it. Who denies it? Certainly not Liberty; certainly not the Anarchists. Anarchism is not a revival of non-resistance, though there may be non-resistants in its ranks. The direction of Mr. Ball's attack implies that we would let robbery, rape, and murder make havoc in the community without lifting a finger to stay their brutal, bloody work. On the contrary, we are the sternest enemies of invasion of person and property, and, although chiefly busy in destroying the causes thereof, have no scruples against such heroic treatment of its immediate manifestations as circumstances and wisdom may dictate. It is true that we look forward to the ultimate disappearance of the necessity of force even for the purpose of repressing crime, but this, though involved in it as a necessary result, is by no means a necessary condition of the abolition of the State.

Related topics