War & Peace Quote by John Milton

Milton’s line lands like a rhetorical trap: if war is the cause, then “endless war” is the effect, the only offspring it can reliably produce. The phrasing is deceptively plain, but the logic is brutal. “Breed” isn’t just metaphor; it’s biological. War becomes a self-replicating organism, an engine that converts every supposed victory into fresh fuel for the next cycle. Milton’s question isn’t seeking an answer. It’s cornering the reader into admitting complicity in the fantasy that violence can tidy up what violence created.

The intent is polemical, forged in a century where political theology and military force kept trading masks. Milton lived through the English Civil Wars, the execution of Charles I, the Commonwealth, and the Restoration: a national lesson in how revolutions can harden into regimes, and how “necessary” conflict metastasizes into habit. That history hangs behind the word “still,” which carries impatience and dread at once. We are still doing this; we are still pretending it will end differently.

Subtextually, the line is also about rhetoric itself. War is sold as an exception, a temporary rupture that restores normal life. Milton flips the sales pitch: war is not the interruption; it is the system. By stripping away banners, causes, and glory, he reduces war to its true product line: more war. It’s a Puritan moral clarity rendered in one clean, insinuating question, designed to make the warmongers sound not heroic but unimaginative.