Leadership Quote by Lester B. Pearson

War doesn’t start with “the people.” It starts with a script, and Pearson is pointing at the writers. “Too often been too easy” is the knife twist: he’s not condemning war as a tragic inevitability so much as exposing it as a repeatable political technique. Incitement isn’t an accident. It’s a lever, pulled by rulers who know how to turn fear, pride, humiliation, and selective history into consent.

The phrasing matters. Pearson doesn’t say governments “go to war”; he says they “incite man to war,” shifting blame from abstract statecraft to a moral failure of leadership. “Man” is also doing double duty: it’s humanity at large, but it’s also the ordinary citizen-soldier, drafted emotionally before he’s drafted legally. The subtext is that publics are not naturally bloodthirsty; they’re persuadable. That’s an indictment of propaganda, of cynical nationalism, of the tidy myth that wars are simply “forced” by circumstances.

Context sharpens the point. Pearson is a mid-century statesman speaking in the long shadow of two world wars and at the dawn of Cold War brinkmanship. As a key advocate of international cooperation and a pioneer of peacekeeping, he’s arguing for institutional friction against that ease: mechanisms that slow leaders down, force scrutiny, and make escalation politically costly. The line reads like a warning label for democracy itself: without vigilance, the same tools that mobilize a nation for collective action can be repurposed to mobilize it for collective violence.