War & Peace Quote by Robert M. La Follette

La Follette’s line is a scalpel aimed at a recurring American habit: treating war not as an emergency measure but as an institutional appetite. The phrasing is deliberately mechanical - “insists,” “prepared,” “insists” again - to suggest a policy machine that, once set in motion, creates its own rationale. Preparation isn’t a deterrent here; it’s a pipeline. If you build the apparatus, fund it, staff it, sell it to the public, you’ve also built the pressure to justify it.

The intent is accusatory but strategic. By naming a “war party,” La Follette turns militarism into a faction with interests, not a patriotic reflex. That’s the subtext: war is pushed by people who gain power, contracts, prestige, or ideological victory from conflict, and who therefore reframe peace as naive or dangerous. “In times of peace” is the key trapdoor. He implies that the sales pitch must begin before any clear threat exists, when skepticism is still possible and the public can be persuaded that vigilance equals virtue.

Context matters: La Follette was a Progressive-era insurgent and a famous critic of concentrated power, later one of the most prominent opponents of U.S. entry into World War I. His warning anticipates the logic that would later be called the military-industrial complex: preparedness becomes policy, policy becomes identity, and identity demands enemies. The quote works because it compresses that cycle into two sentences, making the escalation feel inevitable - and therefore, indictable.