War & Peace Quote by Robert Foster Bennett

Bennett’s line is built to do two jobs at once: define the post-9/11 moment as “war” and redefine dissent as a kind of childish denial. Calling it a “worldwide war against terrorism” doesn’t just describe a threat; it grants the speaker the expanded moral and legal toolkit that “war” unlocks: exceptional measures, long timelines, blurred borders, and a public asked to trade patience (and sometimes rights) for safety. “Worldwide” quietly collapses distinctions between battlefields and neighborhoods, foreign policy and domestic policing, state enemies and scattered networks.

The second sentence is where the rhetoric tightens. “We must have the serenity” borrows the cadence of a prayer, wrapping militarized urgency in the soothing language of personal virtue. That’s not accidental. Serenity reads as maturity, steadiness, even wisdom, turning acceptance into a character test. If you question the frame, you’re not simply wrong; you’re emotionally unserious. “War is not going to go away if we ignore it” is a parental scold aimed at war-weariness: the idea that fatigue itself is a security risk.

Context matters: Bennett was a Republican senator from Utah, speaking in an era when “war on terror” functioned as both policy and political identity. The subtext is permission for permanence. By insisting war won’t “go away,” the quote normalizes a conflict without clear endpoints, where the measure of responsibility becomes endurance rather than strategy, and where skepticism can be recast as avoidance. It’s a compact argument for staying the course by making the alternative sound like willful blindness.