War & Peace Quote by Timothy Radcliffe

Radcliffe’s line performs a high-wire act: it stares straight at the 20th century’s evidence against human reason, then insists on reason anyway. The opening catalog - “lunacy,” “absurdity,” “war and genocide” - isn’t ornamental; it’s a prosecutorial brief. He concedes the harshest possible counterargument before he makes his claim, which gives the sentence moral credibility. A cleric speaking breezily about humanity’s rational nature would sound naïve. A cleric who names genocide first gets to sound defiant.

The subtext is theological but pitched as a civic argument. “We believe” matters: he’s not offering an empirical report so much as a creed about what humans are for. In Catholic intellectual tradition (Aquinas in the background), reason and truth-seeking aren’t optional virtues; they’re part of the human design, capacities that remain even when history looks like a refutation. That’s why “made to seek the truth” carries the weight. It implies purpose, not just preference - an anthropology that refuses to let atrocities define the species’ final meaning.

Contextually, this reads like postwar Europe’s long argument with itself: if modernity produced mechanized slaughter, maybe the Enlightenment story about rational progress was a lie. Radcliffe’s move is to distinguish rationality as vocation from rationality as historical achievement. Humans can be wildly irrational in crowds, under ideology, under fear - and still be creatures who hunger for truth. The intent isn’t to excuse the past century; it’s to defend the possibility of moral responsibility and genuine dialogue in its aftermath. If we’re not truth-seekers by nature, persuasion collapses into power.