“… I fail to believe that Hitler's war – the most terrible in history – was merely due to economic causes, and not to something deeper and more sinister in human outlook and beliefs. … It was an ideology and not merely materialism. It was an ideological obsession, a madness, which can operate as disastrously in nations as in individuals. …”

—  Jan Smuts

Addressing the Canada Club in Ottawa on 29 June 1945, after the United Nations Charter was finalized, as quoted by Louise W. Holborn (ed., 1948) in War and Peace Aims of the United Nations, p. 719

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Jan Smuts 30
military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa 1870–1950

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“To maintain and further raise our present level of economic development, peace among nations must be assured. But they cannot live together in peace if the basic tenet of the ideology by which they are governed is the belief that one's own nation can secure its place in the community of nations by force alone.”

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Context: Repression by brute force is always a confession of the inability to make use of the better weapons of the intellect — better because they alone give promise of final success. This is the fundamental error from which Fascism suffers and which will ultimately cause its downfall. The victory of Fascism in a number of countries is only an episode in the long series of struggles over the problem of property. The next episode will be the victory of Communism. The ultimate outcome of the struggle, however, will not be decided by arms, but by ideas. It is ideas that group men into fighting factions, that press the weapons into their hands, and that determine against whom and for whom the weapons shall be used. It is they alone, and not arms, that, in the last analysis, turn the scales.
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https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8306779-human-believe-what-they-want-to-believe-and-individual-could

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