Politics & Power Quote by Paul Harris

Paul Harris lands his point by treating war not as tragic necessity but as a legal absurdity: the one relationship we dress up as “most important” is also the only one where killing can be officially blessed. The phrasing “How strange it is” is doing sly work. It’s not naive wonder; it’s courtroom incredulity, the tone of a lawyer inviting the jury to notice an obvious contradiction the state would rather normalize. “Sanction of law” is the dagger. Murder becomes respectable not because it changes morally, but because paperwork and flags launder it into legitimacy.

The subtext is a moral challenge to nationalism’s double standard. In personal life, law exists to restrain violence; in international life, law often functions as violence’s permit. Harris sharpens the indictment by calling the nation-to-nation bond “the most important of all,” echoing early 20th-century rhetoric that treated the nation-state as the highest loyalty. If that relationship is primary, he implies, then its ethical rules should be stricter, not looser.

Context matters: Harris lived through an era when industrialized war and imperial competition made mass death routine while international law lagged behind. As a lawyer (and a civic reformer in Rotary’s orbit), he’s pushing a proto-internationalist idea: that civilization shouldn’t stop at the border. The quote works because it frames war as a legal loophole, not an eternal human condition - a problem that can be argued, redesigned, and, crucially, revoked.