This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is a strange and tedious war when violence attempts to vanquish truth. All the efforts of violence cannot weaken truth, and only serve to give it fresh vigor. All the lights of truth cannot arrest violence, and only serve to exasperate it.
War kills men, and men deplore the loss; but war also crushes bad principles and tyrants, and so saves societies.
Men | Principles | War |
To the diplomat of the middle of the twentieth century, war is something that must be averted at almost any cost.
There are two kinds of crimes: those committed by people who are caught and convicted, and those committed by people who are not. Which category a particular crime falls into is directly related to the wealth, power, and prestige of the criminal. The former category includes such crimes as purse snatching, mugging, armed robbery and breaking and entering. The latter category includes war atrocities, embezzlement, most political actions, and budget appropriations.
In the purer ages of the commonwealth, the use of arms was reserved for those ranks of citizens who had a country to love, a property to defend, and some share in enacting those laws, which it was their interest, as well as duty, to maintain. But in proportion as the public freedom was lost in extent of conquest, war was gradually improved into an art, and degraded into a trade.
Art | Conquest | Duty | Freedom | Love | Property | Public | War |
They have not wanted peace at all; they have wanted to be spared war - as though the absence of war was the same as peace.
Dwight Eisenhower, fully Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower
As never before, the essence of war is fire, famine and pestilence. They contribute to its outbreak; they are among its weapons; they become its consequences.
Consequences | War | Weapons |
If we could have ended the war by showing the power of science without killing a single person, all of us would be much happier, more reasonable, and much safer.
Man started out as a "weak thing of the world" and evolved "to confound the things that are mighty." And within the human species, too, the weak often develop aptitudes and devises which enable them not only to survive but to prevail over the strong. Indeed, the formidableness of the human species stems from the survival of its weak. Were it not for the compassion that moves us to care for the sick, the crippled, and the old there would probably would have been neither culture or civilization. The crippled warrior who had to stay behind while the manhood of the tribe went out to war was the storyteller, teacher, and artisan. The old and the sick had a hand in the development of the arts of healing and of cooking. One thinks of the venerable sage, the unhinged medicine man, the epileptic prophet, the blind bard, and the witty hunchback and dwarf.
Care | Civilization | Compassion | Culture | Man | Survival | War | World | Old |
Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
The motto of war is: "Let the strong survive; let the weak die." The motto of peace is: "Let the strong help the weak to survive."
Wilson said that America’s doughboys fought for the Fourteen Points. Roosevelt said the GI was fighting for the Four Freedoms. Johnson and Humphrey sent men out to die for the planting of dams in Vietnam. Nixon preaches a war of generosity. Each time we have fought in this century, our leaders have denied that we did it for ourselves.
Fighting | Generosity | Men | Time | War |
It is war that wastes a nation's wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers and leave the puny, deformed and unmanly to breed the next generation.
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.