War & Peace Quote by Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes doesn’t romanticize war; he strips it down to its operating system. “Force and fraud” aren’t lapses from an otherwise honorable enterprise. They’re “cardinal virtues” - the skills war reliably rewards, the traits that decide who lives, who rules, who gets to call their violence “order.” The line is cold because it’s meant to be: a diagnostic, not a sermon.

The subtext lands harder in the word “virtues.” Hobbes is baiting moral language into admitting its dependence on power. In civil life, “virtue” implies restraint, truthfulness, maybe even mercy. In war, those ideals become liabilities. Hobbes is insisting that ethics are not free-floating principles; they are conditions made possible by security. When the threat level spikes, the moral vocabulary doesn’t disappear - it gets repurposed to justify effectiveness. War sanctifies what peacetime condemns.

Context matters: Hobbes writes in the shadow of the English Civil War, watching institutions fracture and neighbors become enemies. Leviathan is his argument that without a strong sovereign, society slides toward a state of nature where fear governs and preemptive aggression becomes rational. This quote is the bitter kernel of that worldview. If war is the baseline, then deception isn’t an aberration; it’s strategy. Force isn’t cruelty; it’s the only stable currency.

The line also reads like a warning to the politically naive. Expecting wars to be fought cleanly isn’t idealism; it’s self-endangerment. Hobbes isn’t praising brutality so much as daring you to build a peace sturdy enough that you don’t have to call brutality a virtue.