This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"It is only necessary to make war with five things: with the maladies of the body, the ignorances of the mind, with the passions of the body, with the seditions of the city, and the discord of families." - Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL
"Our flag stands for "liberty and justice for all." Our flag must never be misused or defiled as a bandana for war crimes, as a gag against the people's freedom of speech and conscience or as a fig leaf to hide the shame of charlatans in high public office, who violate our Constitution, our laws and our founding fathers' framework for accountable, responsive government." - Ralph Nader
"Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all management of human affairs." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Three things are known only in three places: Valour, which knows itself only in war; Wisdom, only in anger; and Friendship, only in need." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"All history is the decline of war, though the slow decline. All that society has yet gained is mitigation; the doctrine of the right of war still remains." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The real and lasting victories are those of peace and not of war." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There are geniuses in trade, as well as in war, or the State, or letters; and the reason why is this or that man is fortunate is not to be told. It lies in the man; that is all anybody can tell you about it." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"War disorganizes, but it is to reorganize." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"War is on its last legs; and a universal peace is as sure as is the prevalence of civilization over barbarism, of liberal governments over feudal forms. The question for us is only how soon?" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"War, to sane men at the present day, begins to look like an epidemic of insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men's brains instead of their bowels." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up, namely, in education." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Democracies are indeed slow to make war, but once embarked upon a martial venture are equally slow to make peace and reluctant to make a tolerable rather than vindictive, peace." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
"The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions." - Robert Lynd, fully Robert Wilson Lynd
"War in our own civilization is as good an illustration as one can take of the destructive lengths to which the development of a culturally selected trait may go. If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits." - Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton
"All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception. The existent who is regarded as inessential cannot fail to demand the re-establishment of her sovereignty." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
"It is cruelty in war that buyeth conquest," - Philip Sidney, fully Sir Philip Sidney
"The necessity of war, which among human actions is the most lawless, hath some kind of affinity with the necessity of war." - Walter Raleigh, fully Sir Walter Raleigh
"War is based on deception." - Sun Tzu or Sunzi
"Rapidity is the essence of war." - Sun Tzu or Sunzi
"A just war is in the long run far better for a nation’s soul than the most prosperous peace obtained by acquiescence toward wrong or injustice. Moreover, though it is criminal for a nation not to prepare for war, so that it may escape the dreadful consequences of being defeated in war, it must always be remembered that even to be defeated in war is far better than never to have fought at all." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"War is only a sort of dramatic representation, a sort of dramatic symbol of a thousand forms of duty." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"War is the father of all things." - Thucydides NULL
"To hold a pen is to be at war." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves." - William Hazlitt
"War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it." - William Tecumseh Sherman
"War is hell." - William Tecumseh Sherman
"Phrases like “war of attrition” protect the mind from contact with the particular realities of mangled flesh and putrefying corpses." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"If the intellectual has any function in society, it is to preserve a cool and unbiased judgment in the face of all solicitations to passion... During the war, the ordinary virtues, such as thrift, industry, and public spirit, were used to swell the magnitude of the disaster by producing a greater energy in the work of mutual extermination. " - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"The verbal Christian belief in the sanctity of life has not been affected by the impersonal barbarism of twentieth century war." - C. Wright Mills, fully Charles Wright Mills
"The principles of war, not merely one principle, can be condensed into a single word - "Concentration." But the truth this needs to be amplified as the concentration of strength against weakness. And for real value, it needs to be explained that the concentration of strength against weakness depends on the dispersion of your opponent's strength." - B. H. Liddell Hart, fully Captain B. H. Liddell
"We are in the grip of a scientific materialism, caught in a vicious cycle where our security today seems to depend on regimentation and weapons which will ruin us tomorrow… the intellectual achievements of great scientists are being perverted by the material exploitation of industry and war…I have lived to experience the early results of scientific materialism… have watched pride of workmanship leave and human character decline as efficiency of production lines increased… I have seen the science I worshipped and the aircraft I loved destroying the civilization I expected them to save." - Charles Lindbergh, fully Charles Augustus Lindbergh, nicknamed "Slim,""Lucky Lindy" and "The Lone Eagle"
"The pressure that has been brought to bear upon the native people, since the cessation of armed conflict, in the attempt to force conformity of custom and habit has caused a reaction more destructive than war, and the injury has not only affected the Indian, but has extended to the white population as well. Tyranny, stupidity, and lack of vision have brought about the situation now alluded to as the “Indian Problem.”" - Chief Luther Standing Bear
"War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it. " - Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, sometimes known as Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam
"Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war" - Donald Rumsfeld
"It is possible, even probable, that hopelessness among a people can be a far more potent cause of war than greed." - Dwight Eisenhower, fully Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower
"The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals. " - Edward Paul Abbey
"The body is likened to a small city: like two kings who wage war over a city, each desiring to capture it and rule over it, that is, to govern its inhabitants according to his will so that they obey him in all that he decrees for them, so do the two souls - the G‑dly [soul] and the animal [soul] - wage war against each other over the body and all its organs and limbs. The desire and will of the G‑dly soul is that it alone should rule over the person and direct him, and that all his limbs should obey it and surrender themselves completely to it and become a vehicle for it, and serve as a vehicle for its ten faculties [of intellect and emotion] and three "garments" [thought, speech and action]... and the entire body should be permeated with them alone, to the exclusion of any alien influence, G‑d forbid... While the animal soul desires the very opposite." - Shneur Zalman of Liadi
"To deal with the true causes of war one must begin by recognizing as of prime relevancy to the solution of the problem the familiar fact that civilization is a partial, incomplete, and, to a great extent, superficial modification of barbarism. " - Elihu Root
"To a mankind that recognizes the equality of man everywhere, every war becomes a civil war." - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
"It simply is not true that war never settles anything. " - Felix Frankfurter
"Never wage war on religion, nor upon seemingly holy institutions, for this thing has too great a force upon the minds of fools." - Francesco Guicciardini
"A good war makes sacred any cause. " - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Against war it may be said that it makes the victor stupid and the vanquished revengeful. " - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"No one is so foolish as to choose war over peace. In peace sons bury their fathers, in war fathers bury their sons." - Augustus or Augustus Caesar, fully Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, NULL