Daily Inspiration Quote by Ludwig Quidde

Quidde’s dash does the real work: it splits “necessary” from “maintained on the pretext of necessity,” turning a seemingly sober security claim into a suspect alibi. In one sentence, he sketches the self-licking ice cream cone of militarism: weapons are justified by danger, yet the danger is as often manufactured by the existence of weapons as it is measured in any objective way. The phrase “real or imagined” is less a concession than an indictment. It suggests that states don’t merely respond to threats; they curate them, amplifying anxieties until budgets and barracks look like common sense.

As a German pacifist and public critic writing in the long shadow of Bismarckian power politics and the arms races that fed World War I, Quidde is aiming at the rhetoric of inevitability. “Necessity” is the favorite word of governments that want to avoid moral debate: if something is necessary, arguing becomes childish, even treasonous. Quidde punctures that spell by exposing the elastic nature of “danger,” which can be stretched to fit any program, any appropriation, any crackdown.

The subtext is modern: deterrence logic is psychologically seductive because it converts fear into action and uncertainty into procurement. Quidde doesn’t deny that war can be real; he warns that the machinery built to prevent it can survive on imagined war just as efficiently, and once funded, it needs threats the way an industry needs demand.