War & Peace Quote by George Mikes

Mikes doesn’t argue against war with solemnity; he humiliates it with a comedian’s measuring stick. By stacking “better than” three times, he turns a moral claim into a mock-logic proof, the kind of tidy syllogism you’d use to rank hotels or sausages. That’s the point: war loves to dress itself up as necessity, honor, history’s stern homework. Mikes drags it back down to consumer comparison, where it looks obscene.

The line’s bite is in its deliberately ridiculous metrics: “aggressive jokes” versus “least aggressive wars,” “longest jokes” versus “shortest wars.” He’s not pretending jokes can’t be cruel or that humor is automatically virtuous. He concedes the worst version of his preferred alternative - the hostile jab, the tedious shaggy-dog story - then insists it still beats war’s best-case scenario. That inversion exposes war’s rhetorical trick: calling some wars “surgical,” “limited,” “clean.” Mikes replies: even when war is on its best behavior, it’s still war.

Context matters: a European writer born in 1912, Mikes lived through the century when war wasn’t an abstract policy debate but a recurring climate. His humor carries refugee intelligence: the instinct to choose the weapon that leaves fewer bodies. The subtext is a cultural plea: keep conflict in the realm of language, where damage is reversible and shame can replace shrapnel. It’s pacifism written in punchline form, not to soften the message, but to make the pro-war posture look faintly ridiculous - which, politically, is often the first crack in its armor.