War & Peace Quote by Ernest Hemingway

War isn’t being denounced here from a safe distance; it’s being indicted by someone trading on proximity, even ownership: “I know war.” Hemingway’s move is credential-first, and it’s telling. He’s not asking you to empathize with abstract suffering. He’s leveraging the cultural authority of the man who has seen it up close, then pivoting to moral disgust: “nothing...is more revolting.” The disgust is visceral, almost bodily, the kind of reaction that sidesteps ideology and aims for a gut-level verdict.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the romantic machinery that sells war as purification, adventure, or national destiny. Hemingway’s public persona helped build that machinery at times: the hard-drinking, front-line myth; the cult of toughness; the aesthetic of danger. That’s why the line lands with extra force. It’s a self-correction from inside the temple, not a sermon shouted from the street.

The most strategically modern part is the cold utilitarian turn: war is “useless.” He’s not only arguing it’s evil; he’s arguing it no longer works. “Its very destructiveness” makes it self-defeating, destroying “both friend and foe” until the category of victory collapses. Read in the shadow of mechanized slaughter and total war, the claim isn’t pacifist naivete but a grim update: when warfare scales to obliteration, it stops being a tool of policy and becomes a kind of collective sabotage. In that framing, abolition isn’t utopian. It’s damage control.