Life & Wisdom Quote by Donna Leon

That "particular antagonism" does a lot of elegant work: it’s not the hot-blooded slogan of an activist, but the cool, curated distaste of someone who’s considered the institution up close and decided it fails on principle. Leon frames her position as long-held ("always"), which signals worldview rather than mood. And she chooses "antagonism" over something softer like "unease" or "skepticism" - a word that implies friction, a standing conflict, a refusal to be soothed by pageantry or necessity.

As an author best known for crime fiction, Leon’s line reads like a moral preference baked into narrative craft. Military organizations are built on hierarchy, obedience, and sanctioned violence - everything that makes for clean myths and messy ethics. In detective stories, truth is stubborn and particular; the military is often the opposite, demanding loyalty to the unit or nation over loyalty to fact. Her "particular" hints there are many reasons to dislike power, but the military’s version is uniquely insulated: it has uniforms, rituals, and patriotic language that can launder coercion into honor.

Context matters, too. A post-World War II European sensibility carries the memory of what militarism looks like when it stops pretending to be protective. Leon has lived for decades in Venice, a city whose beauty sits uneasily beside tourism, bureaucracy, and the theater of the state. Her antagonism, then, isn’t anti-soldier so much as anti-system: a suspicion of institutions that ask for reverence while demanding silence.