War & Peace Quote by Moshe Sharett

Revolutionary virtue doesn’t age well. Sharett’s line turns the founding myth inside out: the people most celebrated for saving the state can become its most dangerous stewards once the emergency ends. It’s not a cheap jab at veterans or patriots; it’s a warning about political habits forged in war - habits that feel indispensable during existential threat and reckless in peacetime.

Sharett, Israel’s second prime minister and a consummate diplomat, is writing from inside the young state’s pressure cooker. The War of Independence elevated a generation of leaders whose legitimacy came from battlefield command, improvisation, and a moral clarity sharpened by survival. Sharett’s subtext is that those strengths carry an authoritarian aftertaste when institutions need patience, compromise, and the boring friction of law. A wartime leader learns to treat dissent as risk, delay as betrayal, and restraint as weakness. In “normal times,” that psychology doesn’t vanish; it looks for new crises to justify itself.

The sentence is built to sting: “so heroically and courageously” is not flattery but a setup, acknowledging the sacred narrative so he can puncture it without sounding disloyal. “Would be capable” is equally surgical - he’s not accusing everyone, he’s outlining a structural temptation: a state rescued through extraordinary measures may remain addicted to extraordinary measures.

Sharett’s intent reads as institutional self-defense. The catastrophe he fears isn’t invasion; it’s a homegrown unraveling - policy made by martial reflex, politics organized around permanent emergency, and a democracy that confuses military merit with civic judgment.