War & Peace Quote by Dwight Schultz

Schultz isn’t really predicting Martians; he’s diagnosing a familiar human impulse and dressing it in sci-fi drag. By invoking The War of the Worlds, he borrows a ready-made cultural panic button: invasion, collapse, the sudden realization that “civilization” is just a thin agreement. But his twist is to treat Wells less as prophecy than as metaphor for a broader appetite to possess. The line “need to have and own things” reframes alien conquest as an extension of ordinary property logic. The scary part isn’t tentacled outsiders; it’s the everyday machinery of acquisition, territoriality, and status that already governs life.

The subtext sharpens when he links owning to “breed, to think, to create.” Those verbs are supposed to describe living, not purchasing. Schultz blurs the boundary on purpose, suggesting a world where even the most intimate or elevated human acts get processed through an ownership mindset: reproduction as legacy, thought as intellectual property, creativity as commodified content. It’s not subtle, and it’s not trying to be. As an actor, he speaks in big images, not footnotes.

Context matters: Schultz came up in the postwar American century, when space exploration and Cold War paranoia made “invasion” a plausible metaphor for ideology, markets, and media. His cosmic framing (“everywhere, not just on this planet”) is less astronomy than escalation: if the drive to take and control is the real alien, it doesn’t need a spaceship. It just needs permission.