War & Peace Quote by Eamon de Valera

De Valera’s line is restraint dressed up as a moral vow, and it lands with the gravity of someone speaking from inside a continent that has already watched rhetoric become ammunition. The key move is the modesty of “strive”: not a triumphal promise, but an admission that public speech is itself a combustible material. In the wake of war, he frames hatred as a fire that doesn’t merely kill bodies; it incinerates “decent human feeling,” the fragile civic tissue that makes reconciliation possible. That phrasing is strategic. It shifts the debate from punishment or victory to the cost of emotional escalation, as if the real postwar emergency is not borders but psychology.

The subtext is a statesman’s tightrope walk. De Valera is signaling non-involvement in the next round of vendettas while still claiming the ethical high ground. By refusing to “add fuel,” he implies others are already doing it - governments, newspapers, partisans - and he won’t compete in that marketplace of indignation. The image of Europe with “whatever is left” suggests exhaustion and scarcity: moral resources depleted, empathy rationed.

Context sharpens the intent. As Ireland’s leader navigating neutrality and the aftershocks of World War II, de Valera had to protect national sovereignty without appearing indifferent to suffering. This sentence is diplomacy as emotional discipline: an attempt to keep Ireland’s posture legible as principled caution, not cowardice, and to argue that peace can be sabotaged as easily by vengeance as by armies.