This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.
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.
Body | Desire | Rule | Soul | Speech | Surrender | War | Will | Govern | Intellect |
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.
Civilization | War |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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.
War |
Never wage war on religion, nor upon seemingly holy institutions, for this thing has too great a force upon the minds of fools.
Augustus or Augustus Caesar, fully Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, NULL
No one is so foolish as to choose war over peace. In peace sons bury their fathers, in war fathers bury their sons.
Georges Clemenceau, fully Georges Benjamin Clemenceau
It is far easier to make war than peace.
War |
For the sake of humanity, it is devoutly to be wished that the manly employment of agriculture, and the humanizing benefit of commerce, would supersede the waste of war and the rage of conquest; that the swords might be turned into ploughshares, the spears into pruning-hooks, and, as the Scriptures express it, "the nations learn war no more."
George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair
We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases.
George Marshall, fully George Catlett Marshall, Jr.
I believe our students must first seek to understand the conditions, as far as possible without national prejudices, which have led to past tragedies and should strive to determine the great fundamentals which must govern a peaceful progression toward a constantly higher level of civilization. There are innumerable instructive lessons out of the past, but all too frequently their presentation is highly colored or distorted in the effort to present a favorable national point of view. In our school histories at home, certainly in years past, those written in the North present a strikingly different picture of our Civil War from those written in the South. In some portions it is hard to realize they are dealing with the same war. Such reactions are all too common in matters of peace and security. But we are told that we live in a highly scientific age. Now the progress of science depends on facts and not fancies or prejudice. Maybe in this age we can find a way of facing the facts and discounting the distorted records of the past.
Age | Effort | Past | Peace | Present | Progress | Science | War | Govern | Understand |
Swords, Lances, arrows, machine guns, and even high explosives have had far less power over the fates of nations than the typhus louse, the plague flea, and the yellow-fever mosquito. Civilizations have retreated from the plasmodium of malaria, and armies have crumbled into rabbles under the onslaught of cholera spirilla, or of dysentery and typhoid bacilli. Huge areas have bee devastated by the trypanosome that travels on the wings of the tsetse fly, and generations have been harassed by the syphilis of a courtier. War and conquest and that herd existence which is an accompaniment of what we call civilization have merely set the stage for these more powerful agents of human tragedy.
Civilization | Conquest | Existence | Nations | Power | War |
We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries.