This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Omar Bradley, fully Omar Nelson Bradley
The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.
Christian Century Editorial NULL
The ancient theory of the just war breaks down when victory is impossible, when the weapons are so undiscriminating as to destroy both sides.
There is, above all, the laughter that comes from the eternal joy of creation, the joy of making the world new, the joy of expressing the inner riches of the soul - laughter from triumphs over pain and hardship in the passion for an enduring ideal, the joy of bringing the light of happiness, of truth and beauty into a dark world. This is divine laughter par excellence.
Beauty | Eternal | Excellence | Joy | Laughter | Light | Pain | Passion | Riches | Soul | Truth | World | Riches | Hardship | Beauty |
Omar Bradley, fully Omar Nelson Bradley
We have too many men of science, and too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical midgets. We know more about war than we know of peace, more about killing than we know about living.
Conscience | God | Men | Mystery | Peace | Power | Science | War | Wisdom | World |
Never let your persistence and passion turn into stubbornness and ignorance.
Ignorance | Passion | Persistence |
W. Macneile Dixon, fully William Macneile Dixon
The astonishing thing about the human being is not so much his intellect and bodily structure, profoundly mysterious as they are. The astonishing and least comprehensible thing about him is his range of vision; his gaze into the infinite distance; his lonely passion for ideas and ideals.
Those very characteristics which are demanded by war – the ability to tolerate uncertainty, spontaneity of thought and action, having a mind open to the receipt of novel, and perhaps threatening information – are the antitheses of those possessed by people attracted to the controls, and orderliness, of militarism.
Ability | Action | Mind | Orderliness | People | Thought | Uncertainty | War | Thought |
Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible.
Angus Dun and Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
The occasions to which the concept of the just war can be rightly applied have become highly restricted. A war to “defend the victims of wanton aggression” where the demands of justice join the demands of order, is today the clearer case of a just war… The concept of a just war does not provide moral justification for initiating a war of incalculable consequences to end such oppression.
Aggression | Consequences | Justice | Justification | Oppression | Order | War |
Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.
All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means.
Thomas Edison, fully Thomas Alva Edison
There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever. What man's mind can create, man's character can control.
Character | Day | Death | Force | Man | Mind | Order | Science | Torture | War | Will |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
Is there really as much difference as we think between the Aztec human sacrifices to their gods and the modern human sacrifices in war to the idols of nationalism and the sovereign state?
W. R. Forrester, fully William Roxburgh Forrester
Every war of the future will be a war of religion, for no country will go to war till it can give its cause the color of a Crusade and so secure for its maintenance absolute loyalty of a heroic quality in the whole population.
Absolute | Cause | Future | Loyalty | Loyalty | Religion | War | Will |
All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means.
Neil Gaiman, fully Neil Richard Gaiman
There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.