Today is the birthday of Leo Tolstoy. While visiting Paris in his youth he witnessed a public execution, which affected him deeply: "When I saw the head part from the body and how they thumped separately into the box, I understood, not with my mind but with my whole being...

...that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress could justify this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world had held it to be necessary, on whatever theory, I knew it to be unnecessary and bad. . .