"It is good that war is so horrible, or we might grow to like it"
About this Quote
War has to remain ugly, Lee suggests, because humans are disturbingly good at acclimating to anything that rewards them. The line lands like a moral safety catch: if violence ever felt clean, efficient, even gratifying, it would stop being an emergency measure and become a habit. Lee isn’t romanticizing battlefield misery; he’s admitting that war carries seductions - status, clarity of purpose, camaraderie, the intoxicating simplification of politics into friend and enemy. The horror is what keeps those seductions from hardening into taste.
Coming from Robert E. Lee, the sentence is also a study in self-justification and unease. This is a commander trying to square duty with conscience, speaking as someone who knows the machinery intimately: the boredom punctuated by terror, the mangled bodies, the letters home. The phrasing turns revulsion into a kind of civic virtue. If war is “so horrible,” then the act of enduring it can be framed as reluctant necessity rather than chosen aggression. That rhetorical pivot matters in the Civil War context, where both sides produced stories that dignified suffering and tried to claim the moral high ground.
The subtext is the most modern part: appetites are trainable. Make war aesthetic - uniforms, parades, heroic narratives - and you risk breeding a culture that mistakes violence for meaning. Lee’s warning isn’t strategic; it’s psychological, aimed at the thin line between mobilization and addiction.
Coming from Robert E. Lee, the sentence is also a study in self-justification and unease. This is a commander trying to square duty with conscience, speaking as someone who knows the machinery intimately: the boredom punctuated by terror, the mangled bodies, the letters home. The phrasing turns revulsion into a kind of civic virtue. If war is “so horrible,” then the act of enduring it can be framed as reluctant necessity rather than chosen aggression. That rhetorical pivot matters in the Civil War context, where both sides produced stories that dignified suffering and tried to claim the moral high ground.
The subtext is the most modern part: appetites are trainable. Make war aesthetic - uniforms, parades, heroic narratives - and you risk breeding a culture that mistakes violence for meaning. Lee’s warning isn’t strategic; it’s psychological, aimed at the thin line between mobilization and addiction.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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