War & Peace Quote by Harry Emerson Fosdick

War isn’t condemned here as spectacle or strategy, but as a moral technology: a machine that runs on deception and keeps running by manufacturing more of it. Fosdick, a prominent liberal Protestant voice in the early 20th century, is less interested in battlefield horror than in the quieter afterlife of conflict - the way it reorganizes truth, memory, and community long after the shooting stops. That framing fits a clergyman who watched modern mass warfare (and the propaganda systems that fed it) harden publics into believers.

The line’s power is its escalation. “Consequences” feels almost administrative, a word politicians hide behind. Then Fosdick tightens the moral noose: war “lives on” lies, as if falsehood isn’t collateral damage but oxygen. The phrasing implies complicity. Lies aren’t only told by governments; they’re adopted by citizens who want their suffering to mean something and their side to be clean. War requires that kind of psychic laundering.

The final clause - “undying hatreds” - is the real indictment. Fosdick isn’t warning about temporary rage; he’s pointing to intergenerational inheritance, the way violence becomes culture. Hatred outlasts the treaty, becomes a family story, a national identity, a political resource. In that sense, his hatred of war isn’t sentimental pacifism. It’s a suspicion of war’s spiritual economics: it converts grief into certainty, complexity into slogans, neighbors into permanent enemies.