"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."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Systems scientistsMilitary leaders from South AfricaPrime Ministers of South Africa‎Academics from South AfricaPhilosophers from South Africa
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Smuts in a letter dated 8 January 1921, published in the New York Evening Post, 2 March 1921
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jan_Smuts
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Jan Smuts
Jan Christiaan Smuts (24 May 1870 – 11 September 1950) was a South African statesman, general, and intellectual. Amongst the offices that he held, he was Prime Minister of South Africa and Field Marshal in the British Army.
58 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Jan Smuts →
Related Quotes
"The groans of the dying and the blanched set faces of the dead ... were enough to drive away all unwholesome feelings…"
"History writes the word 'Reconciliation' over all her quarrels."
"The war was fought throughout and ultimately won, not only by the usual military weapons in the narrower sense, but b…"
"The grand success of the British Empire depends not on its having followed any constitutional precedent of the past b…"
"At the vital moment there seems to be a failure of leadership, and also a failure of the general human spirit among t…"
"I view it as a thoroughly bad peace – impolitic and impracticable in the case of Germany, absolutely ludicrous in the…"
"If there was to be equal manhood suffrage the whites would be swamped all over South Africa by the blacks and the who…"
"The Mountain is not merely something eternally sublime. It has a great historical and spiritual meaning for us ... Fr…"
"You cannot defeat Russia. Napoleon learned this to his cost and so will the rest of the world. I do not know whether …"
"... the Jameson Raid was the real declaration of war."