War & Peace Quote by Oriana Fallaci

War, in Fallaci's framing, isn't hell in the grand, mythic sense; it's an institution with bad lighting, locked doors, and a staff that calls the screaming "normal". The madhouse metaphor is doing more than heightening horror. It reassigns roles: soldiers, civilians, leaders, correspondents all become "patients", stripped of the comforting hierarchy where some are rational actors and others are collateral. If everyone inside the war is ill, then the old moral alibis -- discipline, duty, strategy, even heroism -- start to look like symptoms.

Fallaci wrote as a journalist who repeatedly entered conflict zones and watched sanity get negotiated in real time. Calling war a madhouse is her way of puncturing the clean language of states: "operations", "theater", "stability". Those terms promise control. A madhouse suggests contagion and institutional self-preservation: once you're inside, the system bends you to its logic, then convinces you that your compliance is evidence you're fine.

The sting is aimed at the reader, too. "Have you ever thought" is an invitation that doubles as an accusation: if you haven't considered it, you've benefited from distance, from the luxury of abstraction. The line also refuses the reassuring idea that madness is confined to the obviously brutal. In war, the most frightening pathology is often the opposite: people functioning efficiently while doing the unthinkable, mistaking coherence for health.