War & Peace Quote by Harry Emerson Fosdick

War isn’t condemned here as an abstract sin or a tragic inevitability; it’s indicted as a political technology. Fosdick, a prominent liberal Protestant voice between two world wars, aims his moral disgust at outcomes that feel almost administrative: democracies get swapped out for dictatorships, hunger arrives not as an accident but as a predictable sequel. The ellipsis after "I hate war..". functions like a held breath, a refusal to romanticize the premise before delivering the receipts. He’s not asking you to pity soldiers; he’s asking you to notice what war reliably does to civilian life and political structure.

The intent is pastoral but strategically worldly. As a clergyman, Fosdick could have leaned on the language of peace, mercy, brotherhood. Instead he chooses consequences: regime change and starvation. That choice signals subtext: people tolerate war when it’s framed as sacrifice, honor, or destiny; they resist it when it’s framed as theft. "Dictatorships" is not only a warning about foreign enemies; it’s a jab at what democracies permit at home under wartime logic: emergency powers, propaganda, curtailed dissent, the normalization of coercion. War doesn’t just defeat freedom; it trains citizens to accept its suspension.

Pairing dictatorship with starvation tightens the argument. Political collapse and material collapse travel together, each feeding the other. Fosdick’s moral authority is leveraged to make a civic point: if you care about democracy and bread-and-butter survival, you can’t treat war as a noble exception. It’s the system that makes exceptions permanent.