Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception of __reatness._ __reatness,_ it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the __reat_ man nothing is wrong, there is no atrocity for which a __reat_ man can be blamed.
War and Peace
Quote Detail
When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception of __reatness._ __reatness,_ it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the __reat_ man nothing is wrong, there is no atrocity for which a __reat_ man can be blamed.
Quick Answer
What this quote page tells you
This canonical quote page keeps the full saying, the attributed author, any linked work, and the topic tags together so the quote can be cited from one stable URL.
Related Quotes
More quote cards from the same area
Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt himself as a king, not because she had made an impression on Anna-he did not yet believe that-but because the impression she had made on him gave him happiness and pride.
Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.
He suffered from an unlucky faculty__ommon to many men, especially Russians__he faculty of seeing and believing in the possibility of good and truth, and at the same time seeing too clearly the evil and falsity of life to be capable of taking a serious part in it.
He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree.
Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.