Leo Tolstoy
Translated by
Dmitry Fadeyev
Reason shows people where they deviate from the law of life. But people are so accustomed to these deviations and find them so pleasant that they try to suppress reason so that it does not get in the way of their living the way they are used to.
Both the salvation and punishment of the human being lies in the fact that, while leading a bad life, he is able to cloud his reason in order to avoid seeing the plight of his situation.
If life does not follow your conscience, then stupefaction will bend your conscience to reflect your life.
When soldiers are standing under cover while taking fire and have nothing to do, they try their best to find some activity for themselves to make it easier to endure the danger. At times everyone seems to resemble these soldiers, trying to save themselves from life: some with ambition, some with cards, some with writing laws, some with women, some with games, some with horses, some with hunting, some with wine and some with state affairs.
It is hard to imagine the beneficial change that would happen to all of human life if people stopped intoxicating and poisoning themselves with vodka, wine, tobacco and opium.
They say about the followers of this one sect that at the end of their gatherings they extinguish the lights so they can indulge in debauchery.
In our society, in order to indulge in constant debauchery people have to keep extinguishing the light of their reason with intoxicating substances.
One of the main conditions for the improvement of the lives of the people of our time is freeing themselves from the influence that is being exercised over them, and meanwhile they are constantly trying their best to keep themselves in this state by means of tobacco, wine and vodka.
The fact that the government takes upon itself the responsibility of supplying alcohol, which corrupts and destroys people’s souls and bodies, while profiting from it, is the clearest indication, even without any further proof, that the government not only does not, as it asserts, care about the morality and the good of the people, but, on the contrary, harms it in the most obvious way for the benefit of the individuals who constitute the government.
While intoxicating yourself by whatever means is not yet a crime, it nevertheless prepares you for every kind of crime.
The vice and, most important, the senselessness of the lives of the people of our time is chiefly caused by a constant state of drunkenness to which they bring themselves. Sober people would be incapable of doing even a small fraction of what is now being done in our world.
You say that it is not important whether or not people drink or smoke. If it is not important, then what is stopping you from quitting, when you know about the harm that your example does both to yourself and to others?