War & Peace Quote by Sheryl Crow

Sheryl Crow’s anti-war take lands less like a policy brief and more like a chorus you can shout back: simple, blunt, morally certain. That’s the point. Coming from a musician whose public persona has long traded in sunny hooks and plainspoken conviction, the quote uses everyday language to cut through the rhetorical fog that usually surrounds war. “Based in greed” isn’t a nuanced diagnosis; it’s an accusation, aimed as much at the machinery of profit and power as at the leaders who narrate conflicts as destiny or duty. She’s writing a villain into the story so listeners can locate their outrage.

The “karmic retributions” line signals her real audience: not generals or diplomats, but ordinary people looking for a moral frame that feels legible. Karma works as a pop-spiritual shorthand for consequence when official accountability feels nonexistent. It’s also a way to insist that violence doesn’t stay contained; it boomerangs, culturally and psychologically, even when the winners declare closure.

Then she shifts from condemnation to a utopian tactic: “not have enemies.” It’s naive on purpose, and that’s the subtext. Crow is rejecting the entire mental infrastructure of war - the sorting of humans into “us” and “them” that makes brutality feel like strategy. In the post-9/11 era, when patriotic branding and endless conflict blurred together, that refusal became its own kind of dissent: a demand to stop treating antagonism as inevitable, and start treating it as manufactured.