“War is to be ranked among the most dreadful calamities which fall on a guilty world; and, what deserves consideration, it tends to multiply and perpetuate itself without end.”

— William Ellery Channing

War (1816)
Context: War is to be ranked among the most dreadful calamities which fall on a guilty world; and, what deserves consideration, it tends to multiply and perpetuate itself without end. It feeds and grows on the blood which it sheds. The passions, from which it springs, gain strength and fury from indulgence.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "War is to be ranked among the most dreadful calamities which fall on a guilty world; and, what deserves consideration, …" by William Ellery Channing?

William Ellery Channing 71

United States Unitarian clergyman 1780–1842

Related quotes

“To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients, by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted.”

Alexander Hamilton Report on Manufactures

Report on Manufactures (1791)
Context: To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients, by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted. Even things in themselves not positively advantageous, sometimes become so, by their tendency to provoke exertion. Every new scene, which is opened to the busy nature of man to rouse and exert itself, is the addition of a new energy to the general stock of effort.

“Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.”

Samuel Johnson The Idler

No. 30 (November 11, 1758)
The Idler (1758–1760)

“The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned in it,) are the natural securities for this transmission.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

“The saint Mirabai is the most famous of the women saints of India and can be ranked among the foremost of the mystics of the world.”

Meera Bai Hindu mystic poet

Swami Yatishwaranandji in “Others on Mirabai”

“Each generation is a filter, a sieve; good genes tend to fall through the sieve into the next generation; bad genes tend to end up in bodies that die young or without reproducing.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

River out of Eden (1995)

“The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

"Dickens"
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

“False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.”

Joseph De Maistre (1753–1821) Savoyard philosopher, writer, lawyer, and diplomat

Les fausses opinions ressemblent à la fausse monnaie qui est frappée d'abord par de grands coupables et dépensée ensuite par d'honnêtes gens qui perpétuent le crime sans savoir ce qu'ils font.
Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, Ch. I

“At the vital moment there seems to be a failure of leadership, and also a failure of the general human spirit among the peoples. I hope I am wrong, but I have a sense of impending calamity, a fear that the war was only the vanguard of calamity … I cannot look at that draft treaty without a sense of grief and shame.”

Jan Smuts (1870–1950) military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa

Smuts to Mary Murray, wife of Gilbert Murray, on the Treaty of Versailles, 2 June 1919, as cited in Antony Lentin, 2010, Jan Smuts – Man of courage and vision, p. 106. ISBN 978-1-86842-390-3

“A guilty party is being sought. Such action is a favorite means of consolation in the face of calamity.”

Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

“Nobody deserves to have to die — not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

Richard Stallman's dissenting view on Steve Jobs http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/10/steve-jobs-stallman-dissenting-view.html in The Los Angeles Times (8 October 2011)
2010s

“War is to be ranked among the most dreadful calamities which fall on a guilty world; and, what deserves consideration, it tends to multiply and perpetuate itself without end.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

William Ellery Channing 71

Related quotes

Related topics