War & Peace Quote by David O. McKay

McKay’s sentence isn’t a Hallmark wish; it’s a theological blueprint that quietly shifts the battleground from parliaments to interiors. “Happiness and peace” are cast as collective outcomes, but the causal engine is intensely private: “enter the souls of men.” The verb matters. Love and compassion don’t get taught, legislated, or negotiated into existence; they arrive like illumination, a “light” that changes what a person is able to see and therefore how they behave. That metaphor does rhetorical work: it frames moral transformation as both gentle (light) and absolute (darkness versus illumination), leaving little room for half-measures.

The subtext is a familiar but pointed religious argument: durable social peace can’t be engineered purely through systems, technology, or coercion. McKay implies that the world’s crises are downstream of a spiritual deficit, not merely a policy failure. That’s a persuasive move for a clergyman-leader: it elevates the church’s domain from personal comfort to global necessity, positioning compassion as a kind of civic infrastructure.

Context sharpens the intent. McKay led the LDS Church through the Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War, eras when “peace” was both a longing and a propaganda word. His formulation sidesteps partisan geopolitics and speaks to an anxious modernity tempted by force, ideology, and suspicion. By rooting peace in “human compassion,” he also broadens the appeal beyond sectarian doctrine while keeping the claim unmistakably spiritual: the world changes when people do, and people change when something luminous gets inside.