War & Peace Quote by Ed O'Neill

Ed O'Neill’s punch line lands because it punctures the sanctimony of an era without pretending he’s above it. He sketches the late-60s/70s “peace movement” scene as less a pure moral awakening than a social costume party with real stakes: if the room’s politics are the price of admission, you learn to pay in the right phrases. The detail about jeans and T-shirts is doing double duty. It signals the uniform of authenticity - anti-establishment style turned instantly into a recognizable brand - and it hints at the quiet conformity inside supposed nonconformity.

“I had to be careful not to say things like ‘I like meat’” is the quote’s sharpest social observation: ideology becomes a etiquette system, where appetites (literal and cultural) are potential violations. Meat stands in for any ordinary preference that suddenly reads as moral failure. He’s not arguing against peace; he’s describing how movements, once popular, develop gatekeeping codes that separate the sincerely committed from the merely adjacent.

Then he detonates the last line: “I just wanted to drink beer and to screw.” Crude, yes, but strategically so. It’s a self-incriminating confession that flips the usual celebrity memoir posture (I was always enlightened) into something more human and more cynical: sometimes “activism” is camouflage for wanting to belong, get laid, and avoid being judged. The intent isn’t to dismiss the movement; it’s to admit how often personal desire rides shotgun with public virtue, and how good we get at mixing the two.