War & Peace Quote by Brooks Atkinson

War doesn’t just break bodies and borders; it quietly rewrites the civic contract, shaving down the very freedoms it claims to defend. Brooks Atkinson’s line lands with the cool efficiency of a critic who has watched the same plot twist too many times: emergency becomes habit, and habit becomes structure. The phrasing is the tell. “After each war” implies this is not an exception but a cycle; democracy isn’t toppled in one dramatic coup, it’s worn away in installments. “A little less” is the most damning part of all, because it normalizes the loss. Small erosions don’t trigger alarms. They get explained away as temporary measures, necessary trade-offs, regrettable but pragmatic.

Atkinson wrote in a century that offered plenty of evidence: World War I’s crackdowns on dissent and speech in the US, World War II’s internment and propaganda machinery, then the Cold War’s loyalty tests and surveillance culture. Each conflict expanded the state’s toolkit: censorship rationalized as security, secrecy as patriotism, centralized power as efficiency. The tools rarely disappear when the shooting stops; they get repurposed.

The subtext is a warning about nostalgia. We like to imagine “saving democracy” as a heroic mission with a clean ending, the flag planted, the credits rolling. Atkinson suggests the real tragedy is procedural: by the time peace arrives, the democracy you thought you were rescuing has been thinned out, its rights negotiated away under pressure, its citizenry trained to accept less as the price of safety. The quote’s sting is its refusal to grant the comforting myth that victory restores what war takes.