Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Georg Brandes, fully Georg Morris Cohen Brandes

The appalling thing about war is that it kills all love of truth.

Character | Love | Truth | War |

Frank Chin

In Confucianism, all of us - men and women - are born soldiers. The soldier is the universal individual. No matter what you do for a living - doctor, lawyer, fisherman, thief - you are a fighter. Life is war. The war is to maintain personal integrity in a world that demands betrayal and corruption. All behavior is strategy and tactics. All relationships are martial. Marriages are military alliances.

Behavior | Betrayal | Character | Corruption | Individual | Integrity | Life | Life | Men | War | World |

Allen E. Claxton

The failure of our modern world, with its moral and ethical collapse, may be traced directly to our spiritual ignorance and moral disobedience. The ethical conditions under which we live are disgracefully unsanitary. It is futile to expect peace and goodwill on earth while our homes are infested with the germs of selfishness, irreverence and lust. The world-wide epidemic of hatred, cruelty, murder and war is the inevitable result of our moral and spiritual disobedience. We cannot break the laws of the universe with impunity.

Character | Cruelty | Disobedience | Earth | Failure | Ignorance | Inevitable | Lust | Murder | Peace | Selfishness | Universe | War | World | Failure | Murder |

William Henry Harrison

When the Golden Rule becomes the law of human life all this will be changed. The employer will ask how much he can pay the worker, not how little. The workman will ask how much he can do, not how little. We may not be able to reach this condition, but the war can be restricted and its evils ameliorated.

Character | Golden Rule | Law | Life | Life | Little | Rule | War | Will | Golden Rule |

John Haynes Holmes

War some day will be abolished by the will of man. This assertion does not in any way invalidate the truth that war is fundamentally caused by impersonal, political, economic and social forces. But it is the destiny of man to master and control such force, even as it is his destiny to harness rivers, chain the lightning and ride the storm. It is human will, operating under social forces, that has abolished slavery, infanticide, dueling, and a score of other social enormities. Why should it not do the same for war?

Assertion | Character | Control | Day | Destiny | Force | Man | Slavery | Truth | War | Will | Wisdom |

Thomas Hobbes

To this war of every man, against every man, this is also consequent that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice, and injustice, are none of the faculties neither of the body, nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his sense, and passions. They are qualities, that relate to men in society, not in solitude. It is consequent also to the same condition, that there be no propriety, no dominion, no mine and thing distinct; but only that to be every man’s, that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it.

Body | Character | Force | Fraud | Injustice | Injustice | Justice | Law | Man | Men | Mind | Nothing | Power | Qualities | Right | Sense | Society | Solitude | War | World | Wrong |

Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor

The only moral virtue of war is that it compels the capitalist system to look itself in the face and admit it is a fraud. It compels the present society to admit that it has no morals it will not sacrifice for gain.

Character | Fraud | Present | Sacrifice | Society | System | Virtue | Virtue | War | Will | Society |

John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when it may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, miscalculation or madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.

Accident | Character | Day | Madness | Man | War | Weapons | Woman | Child |

William Graham Sumner

The four great motives which move men to social activity are hunger, love, vanity, and fear of superior powers. If we search out the causes which have moved men to war we find them under each of these motives or interests.

Character | Fear | Hunger | Love | Men | Motives | Search | War |

John G. Stoessinger

Perhaps the most important single factor in the outbreak of war is misperception: a leader's image of himself; [his] view of his adversary's character; his view of his adversary's intentions, and of his adversary's capabilities.

Character | Important | War |

Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

It is with the desire for peace that wars are waged, even by those who take pleasure in exercising their warlike nature in command and battle. And hence it is obvious that peace is the end sought for by war. For every man seeks peace by waging war, but no man seeks war by making peace... Even wicked men wage war to maintain the peace of their own circle, and wish that, if possible, all men belonged to them, that all men and things might serve but one head, and might, either through love or fear, yield themselves to peace with him!

Battle | Desire | Fear | Love | Man | Men | Nature | Peace | Pleasure | War | Wisdom |

Bible or The Bible or Holy Bible NULL

They shall beat their swords into plough shares and their spears into pruning hooks; nations shall not lift up a sword against nations, neither shall they learn war any more.

Nations | War | Wisdom | Learn |

William E. Borah

It seems perfectly clear to me that we can never make any real progress toward permanent peace so long as well recognize the institution of war as legitimate and clothe it with glory.

Glory | Peace | Progress | War | Wisdom |