War & Peace Quote by Raymond Chandler

Chandler packs an entire worldview into that deadpan aside: civilization is a story people tell when they want you unarmed. The line moves like a private-eye shrug, but it’s really a warning about how safety gets weaponized as rhetoric. “As soon as anyone said you didn’t need a gun” isn’t a neutral reassurance; it’s a signal that someone else is managing the terms of danger. Chandler’s narrator reads that as a con. Trust the man who says you’re fine, and you’re volunteering to be vulnerable.

The syntax does the heavy lifting. “I knew one thing” frames the thought as hard-earned field wisdom, not ideology. It’s a single rule distilled from too many late nights and bad rooms. Then comes the twist: not just take a gun, but “one along that worked.” Chandler’s contempt for performative preparedness is surgical. In noir, competence is moral currency. A useless gun is the prop version of masculinity; a working gun is the admission that the world is not going to be argued into fairness.

Context matters: Chandler is writing in a Depression-and-war-shadowed America where institutions look polished from a distance and rotten up close. His detectives operate in the gap between official order and actual power. The subtext is less Second Amendment sermon than noir epistemology: people lie, systems fail, and the most dangerous moment is when someone invites you to believe otherwise. The wit is that it lands as a practical tip, but it’s really a critique of trust itself.