War & Peace Quote by Gerald Scarfe

Scarfe’s line performs a nervous little dance around a question that usually demands thunder. “How do I feel about war?” invites a manifesto; he answers with a shrug that’s doing damage control in real time. The stumbles - “Well anybody I guess, I hope” - read like someone refusing the glamorous pose of outrage while still wanting to be counted among the decent. It’s not moral cowardice so much as moral hygiene: war is so grotesque that any polished answer risks becoming another aesthetic surface.

Coming from Gerald Scarfe, that matters. Scarfe is an artist whose career has been built on distortion, on pushing faces and institutions into their ugliest truths. His drawings for political satire and his visual world for Pink Floyd’s The Wall don’t treat violence as noble tragedy; they treat it as bureaucracy with teeth. So when he says, essentially, “I don’t like it,” the flatness is the point. It’s a refusal to grant war the emotional grandeur it feeds on.

The subtext is suspicion: suspicion of the interviewer’s need for a quotable stance, suspicion of public appetite for righteous certainty, suspicion of how easily anti-war language can become its own performance. The intent feels almost defensive - to keep his work from being reduced to a slogan, to keep himself from being cast as either hawk or saint. Scarfe’s best weapon is the line he draws, not the line he delivers; this quote dodges rhetoric so the art can do the shouting.