War & Peace Quote by Daniel Boone

For a man mythologized as the hard-eyed edge of American expansion, Boone’s prayerful outburst lands with the force of a contradiction that’s also a confession. He doesn’t curse his enemies; he curses the engine. Calling war an “accursed monster” yanks it out of the realm of strategy and into the realm of plague - something unnatural, ravenous, contagious. That’s a frontier metaphor: war isn’t a clash of flags, it’s what crawls out of the woods when order thins and fear gets leverage.

The line works because Boone names war’s entourage. “Rapine” and “insatiable ambition” are the real culprits, and he frames them as war’s “hated associates,” as if violence is rarely solitary. The subtext is blunt: conflict isn’t born from noble necessity; it’s recruited by appetites - for land, profit, prestige. Coming from an explorer who helped open routes for settlement, that indictment carries an uneasy self-awareness. Boone is both witness to ambition and, in history’s long shadow, a participant in the systems it fed.

The invocation of “Almighty Goodness” also matters. Boone isn’t pitching policy; he’s appealing over the heads of governors and generals, implying that earthly authority can’t restrain what it secretly rewards. It’s moral language as a last refuge - and a quiet critique of a young nation learning to mistake expansion for destiny. The sentence pleads for banishment “from all lands,” a universal scope that reads less like idealism than exhaustion: the frontier taught him how fast “ambition” crosses borders.