War & Peace Quote by Margot Asquith

The sting here is in the gap between what war is and how easily it can be misread as a mood. Asquith opens on a visual: “happy expression,” a surface detail that indicts both the observers who project enthusiasm onto faces and the culture that trains people to perform cheerfulness at the edge of catastrophe. The line doesn’t just condemn war; it condemns the social optics that make war look palatable.

Then she pivots to a deliberately odd catalogue of harmless (stamps), inert (stones), and faintly grotesque (snakes) enthusiasms. It’s a socialite’s scalpel: she grants that people can love almost anything, even things that seem eccentric or distasteful, and still draws a hard boundary at war. The comparison works because it shrinks “loving war” down to the level of a hobby, exposing the obscenity of treating mass death as a passion project. War isn’t merely wrong; it’s conceptually incompatible with love. If someone claims to love it, Asquith suggests, the feeling can only be misnamed: hunger for glory, addiction to spectacle, tribal excitement, careerism, or the relief of having one’s life simplified into slogans.

The context matters. Asquith was close to the center of British political life in the First World War era, watching public morale, propaganda, and class expectations swirl around decisions made far from the trenches. Her skepticism targets the civilian theater of war: the smiles, the send-offs, the curated bravery. Underneath is a refusal to let outward confidence be mistaken for consent, or pageantry for conviction.