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War & Peace Quote by Alfred Whitney Griswold

"The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas"

About this Quote

Griswold’s line is a patrician rebuke to both censorship and cynicism, delivered with the calm confidence of an educator who believes institutions can still cultivate judgment. “Only sure weapon” is doing heavy lifting: it frames intellectual conflict as inevitable, but also insists that coercion, ridicule, or suppression are at best temporary fixes. Bad ideas don’t die because they’re banned; they die when they’re outcompeted.

The subtext is faith in a marketplace of ideas, but not the lazy, libertarian version where truth simply “wins.” Coming from a university president (and former Yale president), the phrase quietly elevates the university’s role: schools aren’t just credential factories, they’re the armory where societies refine arguments, evidence, and moral reasoning. “Better ideas” implies standards - clarity, rigor, explanatory power - and therefore gatekeeping of a kind, but through persuasion rather than force.

Context matters. Griswold lived through fascism, world war, and early Cold War anxieties, when democracies were tempted by loyalty tests, blacklists, and fear-driven conformity. Read against that backdrop, the quote is a defense of liberal education as democratic infrastructure: the antidote to propaganda is not silence, it’s literacy in thinking.

It also carries a warning. If the only durable defense is “better ideas,” then neglecting education, shrinking civic discourse into slogans, or treating expertise as elitism leaves a society disarmed. The line works because it’s aspirational and accusatory at once: you don’t beat corrosive beliefs by wishing them away; you beat them by earning the argument.

Quote Details

TopicReason & Logic
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Griswold, Alfred Whitney. (2026, January 14). The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-only-sure-weapon-against-bad-ideas-is-better-138265/

Chicago Style
Griswold, Alfred Whitney. "The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas." FixQuotes. January 14, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-only-sure-weapon-against-bad-ideas-is-better-138265/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas." FixQuotes, 14 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-only-sure-weapon-against-bad-ideas-is-better-138265/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Alfred Whitney Griswold (October 27, 1906 - April 19, 1963) was a Educator from USA.

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