War & Peace Quote by Karl Kraus

War doesn not begin with bullets; it begins with copy. Karl Kraus, Vienna's great arsonist of complacency, aims this line like a scalpel at the information pipeline that makes mass violence feel inevitable, even reasonable. The cruelty of the joke is in the second clause: diplomats do not merely lie; they come to believe their own lies once they are laundered through print. Propaganda becomes a hall of mirrors where authorship dissolves and accountability with it.

Kraus wrote in an age when newspapers were becoming the central nervous system of public life, and he spent decades anatomizing how journalism could turn language into a delivery system for power. The quote is less a jab at individual bad actors than a system critique: diplomats supply strategic fictions, journalists grant them legitimacy through repetition and framing, and the printed page returns those fictions to the state as "public opinion" and "common sense". The lie, once typeset, acquires the aura of an external fact - something even the liar can point to, cite, and hide behind.

The subtext is bitterly modern: institutions do not need truth; they need circulation. Print functions as a moral solvent, turning violence into policy and policy into narrative. Kraus is also warning that self-deception is not a personal weakness but a professional requirement. If you can convince yourself, you can act with the serene conscience that wars demand.