War & Peace Quote by Joseph Heller

Heller’s jab lands because it treats the honors system the way Catch-22 treats bureaucracy: as a machine that dignifies itself by laundering violence into virtue. He sets up a deliberately indecent comparison - medals for “killing people” versus medals for “entertaining other people” - and then twists the knife with the deadpan verdict that entertainers “deserve ours more.” The provocation isn’t that he’s naïve about war; it’s that he refuses the polite euphemisms that usually shield military heroism from moral accounting.

The context matters: Britain’s MBE, wrapped in pageantry and institutional gravity, is supposed to translate service into status. Heller exposes a crack in that translation. “Lots of people who complained” hints at gatekeeping: the idea that cultural labor is frivolous, that artists are lucky recipients of a prize meant for “real” sacrifice. His counterclaim flips the hierarchy. If the state rewards outcomes, then rewarding killing is a confession about what the state ultimately values. If it rewards “entertaining,” it’s at least rewarding something that doesn’t require a body count.

The subtext is less pacifist sermon than moral audit. Heller isn’t accusing individual soldiers; he’s accusing the story we tell about them - a story that treats sanctioned violence as noble by default, while treating art as suspect unless it behaves. The line works because it’s funny in a grim way: it forces you to laugh and then notice what, exactly, you just laughed at.