20 quotes
It is not the facts which guide the conduct of men, but their opinions about facts; which may be entirely wrong. We can only make them right by discussion.
God has made Canada one of those nations which cannot be conquered and cannot be destroyed, except by itself.
Canada's Best Service for British Ideals (1913)
The force which makes for war does not derive its strength from the interested motives of evil men; it derives its strength from the disinterested motives of good men.
Peace and the Public Mind (1935)
This book endeavors to clear away the mists which prevent so many from seeing the road.
The Great Illusion (1910)
The usual definition of the functions of money are that money is a medium of exchange, a measure of value, a standard of deferred payment and a store of value.
Sir Norman Angell in The Story of Money (1930)
Political nationalism has become, for the European of our age the most important thing in the world, more important than civilization, humanity, decency, kindness, pity, more important than life itself.
The Unseen Assassins (1932)
Our evils are due mainly to the failure to apply to our international relationships knowledge which is of practically universal possession, often self-evident in the facts of daily life and experience.
Peace and the Public Mind (1935)
Before war can be fought, a long series of necessary steps, which quite obviously are not and cannot be enforced steps, must be taken by the mass of men.
Peace and the Public Mind (1935)
The fight for ideals can no longer take the form of fight between nations, because the lines of division on moral questions are within the nations themselves and intersect the political frontiers.
The Great Illusion (1910)
We use power, of course, in the international fields in a way which is the exact contrary to the way in which we use it within the state.
Peace and the Public Mind (1935)
While it is fashionable to-day to declare that "war does not pay" nearly everyone believes that policies which lead inevitably to war do pay. Every nation sincerely desires peace; and all nations pursue courses which, if persisted in, must make peace impossible.
The conception that we can only protect ourselves if we are prepared to protect others surely ought to belong to the nursery stage of social education.
Peace and the Public Mind (1935)
Not more knowledge but better use of the knowledge which we now have, is perhaps the main educational need and the main educational problem which confronts us.
Peace and the Public Mind (1935)
The economic difficulty of the modern world is not shortage of materials but the organization of their exchange and distribution; distress arises, not from scarcity but from dislocation and maladjustment.
Peace and the Public Mind (1935)
The fact that men are naturally quarrelsome is presumed to be an argument against such institutions as the League. But it is precisely the fact of the natural pugnacity of man that makes such institutions necessary.
Peace and the Public Mind (1935)
The prosperity of a people depends upon such facts as the natural wealth of the country in which they live, their social discipline and industrial character, the result of generations, of centuries, it may be, of tradition.
The Great Illusion (1910)
The Council of the Union of Democratic Control re-affirms its unshaken conviction that a lasting settlement cannot be secured by a peace based upon the right of conquest and followed by commercial war, but only by a peace which gives just consideration to the claims of nationality, and which lays the foundation of a real European partnership.
War has no longer the justification that it makes for the survival of the fittest; it involves the survival of the less fit. The idea that the struggle between nations is a part of the evolutionary law of man's advance involves a profound misreading of the biological analogy.
The warlike nations do not inherit the earth; they represent the decaying human element.
The Great Illusion (1910)
I joined the Labour Party not because it was Left Wing, but because it was definitely internationalists and would seem to be the group in the Labour Party which would serve my purpose best for propaganda along internationalist lines.
After All (1951)
It is, of course, merely a truism to say that war, like other social or political evils, is the outcome of the bad management of human society, which is, in its turn, due to certain errors or deficiencies. But our task is to discern the sort of error or deficiency.
Peace and the Public Mind (1935)