Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
World Peace
I am the last man in the world to say that the succor which is given us from America is not in itself something to rejoice at greatly. But I also say that I can see more in the knowledge that America is going to win a right to be at the conference table when the terms of peace are discussed…. It would have been a tragedy for mankind if America had not been there, and there with all her influence and power.
D. Lloyd George—Speech, at the Meeting of American Residents in London. April 12, 1917.
To Woodrow Wilson, the apparent failure, belongs the undying honor, which will grow with the growing centuries, of having saved the “little child that shall lead them yet.” No other statesman but Wilson could have done it. And he did it.
Gen. Jan Christian Smuts—Letter. Jan. 8, 1921. Printed in N. Y. Evening Post, March 2, 1921.
It was the human spirit itself that failed at Paris. It is no use passing judgments and making scapegoats of this or that individual statesman or group of statesmen. Idealists make a great mistake in not facing the real facts sincerely and resolutely. They believe in the power of the spirit, in the goodness which is at the heart of things, in the triumph which is in store for the great moral ideals of the race. But this faith only too often leads to an optimism which is sadly and fatally at variance with actual results. It is the realist and not the idealist who is generally justified by events. We forget that the human spirit, the spirit of goodness and truth in the world, is still only an infant crying in the night, and that the struggle with darkness is as yet mostly an unequal struggle…. Paris proved this terrible truth once more. It was not Wilson who failed there, but humanity itself. It was not the statesmen that failed, so much as the spirit of the peoples behind them.
Gen. Jan Christian Smuts—Letter, Jan. 8, 1921. Printed in N. Y. Evening Post, March 2, 1921.
Rules of conduct which govern men in their relations to one another are being applied in an ever-increasing degree to nations. The battlefield as a place of settlement of disputes is gradually yielding to arbitral courts of justice.
William Howard Taft—Dawn of World Peace. In U. S. Bureau of Education Bulletin. No. 8. (1912).
The development of the doctrine of international arbitration, considered from the standpoint of its ultimate benefits to the human race, is the most vital movement of modern times. In its relation to the well-being of the men and women of this and ensuing generations, it exceeds in importance the proper solution of various economic problems which are constant themes of legislative discussion or enactment.
William Howard Taft—Dawn of World Peace. In U. S. Bureau of Education Bulletin. No. 8. (1912).