War & Peace Quote by Robert Capa

War doesn’t just demand courage; Capa argues it demands emotional bias. The line is blunt because he’s describing a psychological operating system, not a moral ideal. As a combat photographer, Capa lived at the nerve-end of conflict where “objectivity” is often a luxury sold far from the front. His claim is less about endorsing hatred than admitting what it takes to keep functioning when the world turns into an assembly line of suffering.

The quote works by yanking the listener away from the comforting fantasy of the neutral witness. “You must hate somebody or love somebody” is deliberately extreme, a forced binary that mirrors the way war compresses life into enemies, comrades, targets, civilians. It’s also a confession: the camera may frame events, but the person holding it needs a reason to press the shutter and to keep standing there. “You must have a position” isn’t partisan cheerleading so much as a survival technique. Without an internal stance, the chaos becomes unbearable; the mind rebels against the randomness of death and the moral vertigo of watching it.

In Capa’s context - covering the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the birth of modern photojournalism - the statement doubles as a critique of audiences who demand clean narratives from messy realities. He’s warning that even the act of documentation is not emotionally neutral. The photographer’s “position” may be empathy, outrage, loyalty, or sheer refusal to look away, but it’s never nothing.