Jan Smuts Quotes

1870–1950 South Africa

Jan Christiaan Smuts (24 May 1870 – 11 September 1950) was a South African statesman, general, and intellectual. Amongst the offices that he held, he was Prime Minister of South Africa and Field Marshal in the British Army.

South Africa
Academics
Botanists
Educators
Military leaders

Also known as: Jan Christiaan Smuts, Jan Christian Smuts, Smuts, Jan Christiaan

Random Jan Smuts quote

14 quotes

It is the cleanest, neatest, most sudden and spectacular victory of the war, and in size is quite comparable to the German defeat before Stalingrad.

We do not want new orders. What the world wants is an old order of 2,000 years ago – the order of the man of Galilee.

History writes the word 'Reconciliation' over all her quarrels.

Smuts to Alfred Milner (1905)

If a nation does not want a monarchy, change the nation’s mind. If a nation does not need a monarchy, change the nation’s needs.

Just as we preach a "black peril" so they will begin to speak of a "white peril" and of the hostility the white men have toward them.

Some of you will not come back. Some of you will come back maimed. Those of you who do come back will come back changed men. That is war!

The idea that the Natives must all be removed and confined in their own kraals is in my opinion the greatest nonsense I have ever heard.

The intimate rapport with nature is one of the most precious things in life. Nature is indeed very close to us; sometimes closer than hands and feet, of which in truth she is but the extension. The emotional appeal of nature is tremendous, sometimes almost more than one can bear.

Holism and Evolution (1926)

If there was to be equal manhood suffrage the whites would be swamped all over South Africa by the blacks and the whole position for which whites have striven for 200 years or more would be given up.

Statement at the Imperial Conference (1921)

(Holism is) the tendency in nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts through creative evolution ...

Holism and Evolution (1926)

The grand success of the British Empire depends not on its having followed any constitutional precedent of the past but on having met a new situation in history with a creation in law; and as a matter of fact the new constitutional system grew empirically and organically out of the practical necessities of the colonial situation.

Having no human companion I felt a spirit of comradeship for the objects of nature around me. In my childish way I communed with these as with my own soul; they became the sharers of my confidence.

Holism and Evolution (1926)

... the Jameson Raid was the real declaration of war.

The Mountain is not merely something eternally sublime. It has a great historical and spiritual meaning for us ... From it came the Law, from it came the Gospel in the Sermon on the Mount. We may truly say that the highest religion is the Religion of the Mountain.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Jan Smuts (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.