War & Peace Quote by Gerry Adams

“Making peace” lands here like a confession, not a slogan. Gerry Adams isn’t romanticizing reconciliation; he’s stressing its grind. War has a brutal clarity: pick a side, tighten discipline, demand sacrifice, reward loyalty. Peace is messier because it asks for the opposite skills. It requires patience instead of adrenaline, compromise instead of purity, and the ability to sit across from people you’ve spent years training yourself to dehumanize.

The line also doubles as political self-defense. Adams, tied in public imagination to the IRA’s campaign while steering Sinn Fein into electoral legitimacy, frames peacemaking as the real test of leadership. It subtly shifts the moral spotlight: the hard thing now is not armed struggle but persuading your own base to accept partial wins, ambiguous outcomes, and the slow indignities of democratic process. “I have found” personalizes it, inviting credibility without spelling out culpability.

Context matters: Northern Ireland’s peace process demanded not just stopping violence but building institutions capable of containing old grievances. A ceasefire can be declared; a shared future has to be negotiated, staffed, funded, policed, and repeatedly defended from spoilers who benefit from renewed conflict. Adams’ sentence is compact because it’s designed to puncture a comforting myth: that peace is the natural resting state and war the interruption. He’s arguing the reverse. War is often the easier, lazier story. Peace is the difficult rewrite.