War & Peace Quote by Moshe Sharett

There is a cold-blooded clarity to Sharett's phrasing: he doesn’t accuse an army of loving war so much as he indicts a mindset that treats war as maintenance. The target is not the battlefield but the armchair logic of “curious people” who theorize morale like it’s a machine part that needs periodic lubrication - with blood. By framing the claim as something people have “become accustomed to think,” he exposes how quickly violence can harden into habit, then into doctrine.

The line works because it flips a familiar argument on its moral axis. Military morale is usually defended as a protective good - cohesion, readiness, deterrence. Sharett drags the idea to its ugly implication: if morale requires opportunities to kill, then the institution is being psychologically fed, not merely prepared. “Freedom to shed blood” is especially pointed. Freedom is normally the word of liberation; here it’s permission for sanctioned harm. That inversion is the sentence’s sting.

Context matters: Sharett, a leading Israeli statesman and often the more cautious counterweight to militant impulses in early Israeli politics, is speaking from inside a security-obsessed society that had real enemies and real trauma. That’s what gives the critique its bite. He isn’t preaching pacifism from a safe distance; he’s warning how national insecurity can be weaponized into a craving for “use” of force. The subtext is institutional: once an army becomes a central civic religion, it will generate its own incentives, and “morale” becomes the respectable euphemism for keeping the cycle going.