Jan Christiaan Smuts Quotes

Let us not be fanatical about our past and romanticize it. Only on the basis of taking from the past what is beautiful can fruitful co-operation and brotherhood between the two white communities be built. And only on this basis can a solution be found for the greatest problem which we have inherited from our ancestors, the problem of our native relations. [...] This is the most difficult and the final test of our civilization.

The groans of the dying and the blanched set faces of the dead ... were enough to drive away all unwholesome feelings of exultation, and to remind one of the grim reality that war is. And even though these were the faces and the sufferings of our enemy, one had ... a deeper sense of the common humanity which knows no racial distinctions.

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

You cannot defeat Russia. Napoleon learned this to his cost and so will the rest of the world. I do not know whether Bolshevism is advancing or subsiding. There comes a time when the fiercest fires die down. But the best way to revive or rally all Russia to the Soviet Government is to invade the country and to annex large slices of it.

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.

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.

While these things were going on in South Africa – one of the greatest dramas in the recent history of the world – the same conditions were reproducing themselves in the greater world outside. From the Boer War onwards a new spirit seemed to have permeated the nations of Europe. The nineteenth century had been called the century of nationality, but the early years of the twentieth century were years of intense nationalism, morbid nationalism. Nations lost their heads in efforts at self aggrandisement, and this had become so intense and so selfish that a clash became inevitable. Again you see a problem in holism. Where there should have been a united family of nations we saw the elements drifting apart, we saw disunity and disruption, and we saw in the end the greatest crash in the history of the world. When the Great War ended there was the same problem in holism. I think the League of Nations is a genuine effort in reconstructing the broken front of European civilisation, of once more reforming unity out of division and discord.

I view it as a thoroughly bad peace – impolitic and impracticable in the case of Germany, absolutely ludicrous in the case of German Austria. Indeed I have not been able to read the comments of the Austrian delegates on our draft terms without deep emotion. I have fought this Peace from the inside with all my power, and have no doubt been able in the end to secure some small openings of hope for the future.

I find our modern emphasis on 'rights' somewhat overdone and misleading ... It makes people forget that the other and more important side of rights is duty. And indeed the great historic codes of our human advance emphasised duties and not rights ... The Ten Commandments in the Old Testament and ... the Sermon on the Mount ... all are silent on rights, all lay stress on duties.

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.

The House, which was free to have decided otherwise, takes a stand for the defence of freedom and the destruction of Hitlerism and all that it implies. … The interests of South Africa, however, are our primary concern. … It was for the interests of South Africa that Parliament freely decided to sever our relations with Germany. We pledge our moral support for a common cause. … The Union has no quarrel with the German people as such. Its aim is to assist in the destruction of a system which is seeking to impose on the world a domination of violence and force in international affairs – a system which, as the facts of the past two years have proved, knows no respect for good faith between nations, which does not hesitate to dishonour its plighted word, if convenient to do so, and which threatens the liberty of every state throughout the world.

I don't suppose any first-class work in science is done now outside of the war work ... Of course ... science has fallen into discredit. It has brought no solution to our human problems, and has added greatly to our engines of destruction in this war. Not that science is to blame for this misuse, but people judge by results, and by that standard science has a heavy account to liquidate. Science so far has had far too much to do with the things of sense and of matter, and the things of the spirit have been by-passed.

Whatever shall we do in future? The nation that does not arm continuously is lost – as France has been lost, as Britain will be lost but for the Grace of God. In this mechanistic age where bravery and improvised organization at the last moment will not help. The only alternative is a League of the Nations or of some nations strong enough to withstand aggression ...

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

In all the previous cases of wholes, we have nowhere been able to argue from the parts of the whole. Compared to its parts, the whole constituted by them is something quite different, something creatively new, as we have seen. Creative evolution synthesises from the parts a new entity not only different from them, but quite transcending them. That is the essence of a whole. It is always transcendent to its parts, and its character cannot be inferred from the characters of its parts.