War & Peace Quote by Crystal Eastman

Indifference is the velvet glove of power: it doesn’t argue with you, so it doesn’t have to risk losing. Eastman’s line is a strategist’s diagnosis, not a moral lament. Hostility at least confirms you’ve hit a nerve; it draws lines, creates villains, and supplies the friction that turns complaint into movement. Indifference is worse because it starves a cause of the oxygen it needs - attention, urgency, the sense that something is at stake right now.

Then she delivers the sharper twist: the deadliest response isn’t even apathy, it’s polite agreement. When “everybody admit[s]” an agitation is “fundamentally right,” the establishment offers a narcotic compliment. It concedes the principle while withholding the practice. This is the classic liberal trapdoor: your critique is absorbed as sentiment, filed under “important issue,” and neutralized by being treated as already settled. If it’s “fundamentally right,” why the noise? Why the disruption? Eastman exposes how affirmation can be a form of dismissal, a way to recast struggle as bad manners.

Context matters. Eastman worked in the heat of early 20th-century reform - labor rights, suffrage, anti-war activism - where elites routinely professed sympathy while delaying, diluting, or redirecting demands. As a lawyer and organizer, she understood that politics runs on incentives, not admissions. The quote’s intent is to warn activists: don’t confuse being agreed with for being answered. Victory isn’t moral recognition; it’s changed conditions.