Daily Inspiration Quote by John Keegan

Keegan’s line is a neat provocation: it dares the reader to separate the politics of war from the human qualities that make armies function. Coming from a historian who spent his career describing what battle feels like on the ground, it’s less a recruitment slogan than an insistence on moral and analytical honesty. If you want to argue against war, you should still be able to recognize why people endure it.

“Even a pacifist” sets the bar at the most anti-war position imaginable, then asks for a concession. The phrasing implies that refusing to make that concession isn’t principled; it’s willfully blind. “Military virtues” is the pressure point. Keegan doesn’t say “military victories” or “military necessity.” He points to traits like discipline, courage under stress, loyalty, competence, and self-sacrifice - qualities that can be ethically admirable even when the cause is not. The subtext is uncomfortable: these virtues are portable. They can serve liberation or conquest, defense or atrocity, which is precisely why serious societies should understand them instead of romanticizing or demonizing them.

Context matters: Keegan wrote in the long shadow of World War II and during the Cold War, when liberal democracies depended on standing militaries while also fearing militarism. His work pushed back against armchair abstraction by foregrounding the lived experience of soldiers. This sentence tries to deny pacifism an easy aesthetic: you don’t get to be clean by pretending the martial code is pure brutality. You also don’t get to praise virtue without reckoning with the institution that trains it for violence.