If some people, despite recognizing the virtue of love, can admit the necessity of tormenting or murdering certain people for the sake of some future good, then others, by just the same right and also acknowledging the virtue of love, can claim the same necessity in the name of some future good. Thus it might appear obvious that the admission of any kind of exception to the requirements of fulfilling the law of love diminishes the whole significance, meaning and virtue of this law which lies at the basis of all religious doctrines and teachings on morality. Nevertheless, the people of Christendom, both believers and non-believers who still acknowledge the moral code, regard the teaching on love that opposes all violence (especially the doctrine of non-resistance to evil that follows from the law of love) as something fantastic, impossible and totally inapplicable to life.

The Law of Love and the Law of Violence by Leo Tolstoy