This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The grim fact is that we prepare for war like precocious giants and for peace like retarded pygmies." - Lester Pearson, fully Lester Bowles "Mike" Pearson
"Peace is a value which man has always sought: Peace among the nations, peace among men, but most of all peace of mind. While man has sought peace external to himself, he may have overlooked the fact that the peace that will influence all living things will be the peace that is first discovered within himself." - Cecil F. Poole
"Plenty is the child of peace." - William Prynne
"We should provide in peace what we need in war." - Publius Syrus
"Commerce tends to wear off prejudices which maintain destruction and animosity between nations. It softens and polishes the manners of men. It unites them by one of the strongest of all ties - the desire of supplying their mutual wants. It disposes them to peace by establishing in every state an order of citizens bound by their interest to be the guardians of public tranquillity." -
"Peace is when time doesn't matter as it passes by." - Maria Schell, fully Maria Margarethe Anna Schell
"Peace is rarely denied to the peaceful." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
"The only way to judge an event in life is to look at it from high enough, to see it in the order and dimension of the timeless. When we see pain, suffering and inequalities, we don’t understand or we jump to false conclusions. We see only the broken arc of a complete circle. Instead, life is a field for progress and progressive harmony. Each one of us has a part to play which he alone can execute. This role, based on our real nature - what Hindu scriptures call svabhava - can be discovered. An individual’s aim in life must be to find out the “law of his being” and act according to his svadharma. This discovery is no easy task. Normally, we are aware of our ego, the surface self that is a bundle of contradictory impulses. But we can find the true self, our best self, by a process of standing back and surveying our needs. Abandoning desire and self-assertion, accepting the challenges of life in a state of stable, unwavering peace will result in this supreme revelation. When life’s shocks turn our eyes inward, we rise above contingencies of time and place. Our perspective changes. The greatest sorrows is transformed into a luminous vibration. We see into the life of things. Life itself, a single, immense organism, moves toward a greater and higher harmony as more and more cells become conscious of their uniqueness. Life, then, is not Macbeths’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It is a grand orchestra in which discordant notes contribute to the total harmony." - V. S. Seturaman
"Peace is not merely a vacuum left by the ending of wars. It is the creation of two eternal principles, justice and freedom." - James T. Shotwell
"Depend on this one fact: The future of mankind, peace, progress and prosperity must be finally determined by the extent to which men can be brought to a state of common and honest understanding." - Francis Edward Smedley
"Understanding comes through communication, and through understanding we find the way to peace." - Ralph C. Smedley
"The greatest curse that can be entailed on mankind is a state of war. All the atrocious crimes committed in years of peace, all that is spent in peace by the secret corruptions, or by the thoughtless extravagance of nations, are mere trifles compared with the gigantic evils which stalk over this world in a state of war. God is forgotten in war; every principle of Christianity is trampled upon." - Sydney Smith
"Order is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the state. As the beams to a house, as the bones to the microcosm of man, so is order to all things." - Robert Southey
"The alternative to peace is not war. It is annihilation." - Raymond Gram Swing
"In the night we stumble over things and become acutely conscious of their separateness, but the day reveals the unity which embraces them. And the man whose inner vision is bathed in consciousness at once realizes the spiritual unity which reigns over all racial differences, and his mind no longer stumbles over individual facts, accepting them as final. He realizes that peace is an inner harmony and not an outer adjustment, that beauty carries the assurance of our relationship to reality, which waits for its perfection in the response of our love." -
"Religion is not a fractional thing that can be doled out in fixed weekly or daily measures as one among various subjects in the school syllabus. It is the truth of our complete being, the consciousness of our personal relationship with the infinite; it is the true center of gravity of our life. This we can attain during our childhood by daily living in a place where the truth of the spiritual world is not obscured by a crowd of necessities assuming artificial importance; where life is simple, surrounded by fullness of leisure, by ample space and pure air and profound peace of nature; and where men live with a perfect faith in the eternal life before them." -
"One of the most ordinary weaknesses of the human intellect is to seek to reconcile contrary principles, and to purchase peace at the expense of logic." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defense of peace must be constructed." - UNESCO Constitution NULL
"I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to se beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television - of that I am quite sure." - E. B. White, fully Elwyn Brooks White
"I have said that the soul is not more than the body, and I have said that the body is not more than the soul, and nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is, and whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud, and I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth, and to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times, and there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero, and there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel'd universe, and I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes. And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God, for I who am curious about each am not curious about God, (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.) I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. Why should I wish to see God better than this day? I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, in the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropt in the street, and everyone is sign'd by God's name, and I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go, others will punctually come for ever and ever. " - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war but on the love of peace." - Herman Wouk
"The object of war is peace." - Henry Merritt Wriston
"To explain the relative peace of the wicked and suffering of the righteous is beyond us." - Yannai NULL
"We wake up to find the whole world building competitive trade barriers, just as we found it a few years ago building competitive armaments. We are trying to reduce armaments to preserve the world solvency. We shall have to reduce competitive trade barriers to preserve the world's sanity. As between the two, trade barriers are more destructive than armaments and more threatening to the peace of the world." - Owen D. Young
"We can listen to the voice of the Earth as she shakes and sings her song expressing her tiredness. She is calling us to attention, to be alert, to recognize that now is the time to transform selfish thought and action to compassionate caretaking. Do we want a world of peace and harmony? Are we willing to make that peace within ourselves? Will we call it forth? It is your choice. Your thought and action make a difference." - Dhyani Ywahoo
"Even on the path to God, All is God. You are freed from your own desires only when God frees you. This is not effected by your own exertion, but by the grace of God... Then you entirely recognize that you do not have the right to say “I” or “mine.” At this stage you behold your helplessness; desires fall away from you and you become free and calm. You desire what God desires; your own desires are gone, you are emancipated from your wants, and I have gained peace and joy in both worlds. First, action is necessary, then knowledge, in order that you may know that you know nothing and are no one. This is not easy to know. It is a thing that cannot be rightly learned by instruction, nor sewed on with needle nor tied on with thread. It is the gift of God." -
"As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us." - Chinua Achebe, formally Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe
"Let human prudence say what it likes and reason as it pleases, it is impossible to produce true temporal peace and tranquillity by things repugnant or opposed to the peace and happiness of eternity." - Silvio Antoniano
"Happy are those whose life is today and only today. Sad are the prophets and those others whose eyes are open to the past. Blessed are they who neither see their painful yesterdays nor their tomorrows filled with despair: they rest in peace." - Ayi Kwei Armah
"The humble soul is a temple of God, a seat of wisdom, a throne of the word, a house of the consoler, a room of the bridegroom, the receiver of the covenant, a golden throne of grace, a tabernacle of holiness, a place of holy peace, a paradise of pleasure, a closed garden, a sealed fountain, a heavenly dwelling place." - Johann Arndt
"It is better we disintegrate in peace and not in pieces." - A. J. Ayer, Alfred Jules Ayer
"An ounce of peace is worth more than a pound of victory." - Robert Bellarmine, fully Saint Robert Bellarmine
"The object of government in peace and in war is not the glory of rulers or of races, but the happiness of the common man." - William Henry Beveridge
"For when, though love, the soul goes beyond all work of the intellect and all images of the mind, and is rapt above itself (a favor only God can bestow), utterly leaving itself, it flows into God: then is God its peace and fullness... It sinks down into the abyss of divine love, where, dead to itself, it lives in God." - Blosius, fully Abbot Louis de Blois and Franciscus Ludovicus Blosius NULL
"To be human is to long for something more, something beyond us. Fulfillment, peace, and lasting happiness, for no apparent reason, seem to have evaded us. We believe that we are meant for happiness and made for joy. Pain and suffering are somehow a mistake that should not be part of life." - Joe Boot
"If justice prevails, good faith is found in treaties, truth in transaction, order in government, the earth is at peace, and heaven itself sheds overus its beneficent light and radiates down to us its blessed influence." - Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
"Peace is more than simply the absence of aggression and war. Peace transcends the end of a conflict or a statement of policy. While we may force the outward appearance of peace upon a people or a nation, it is the underlying thinking that must change to create a true and lasting peace." - Gregg Braden
"The way that we attune to our possible outcomes is through our viewpoint of life. From this perspective, every life-threatening condition of each body is already healed, peace is already present, and every child, woman, and man of our world is already fed. Now we are invited to choose the quality of thought, feeling, and emotion that allows us to “bend” the waves of time and bring these conditions into the focus of the present." - Gregg Braden
"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." - Omar Bradley, fully Omar Nelson Bradley
"Always remember that the people are not fighting for ideas, nor for what is in men’s minds. The people fight and accept the sacrifices demanded by the struggle in order to gain material advantages, to live better and in peace, to benefit from progress, and for the better future of their children. National liberation, the struggle against colonialism, the construction of peace, progress and independence are hollow words devoid of any significance unless they can be translated into real improvement of living conditions." - Amilcar Cabral
"To secure peace is to prepare for war." - Carl von Clausewitz, fully Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz, also Karl von Clausewitz