War & Peace Quote by David O. McKay

Peace is framed here not as a diplomatic outcome but as a spiritual compliance test. McKay’s line has the cadence of a public-service announcement and the logic of a sermon: yes, people can want peace, shout for it, even organize their lives around it, but those efforts are ultimately cosmetic unless they submit to the “path” of the Living Christ. The repetition of “peace” (yearn, cry, work) acknowledges modern activism and political idealism, then quietly demotes them to insufficient substitutes. It’s a rhetorical move that flatters the listener’s desire for goodness while redirecting authority away from human institutions and toward a single religious source.

The subtext is exclusivity presented as clarity. By calling Christ “the true light of men’s lives,” McKay isn’t merely offering Christianity as one effective moral framework; he’s positioning it as the only one that can produce real peace. That’s why the sentence pivots on “but”: yearning becomes noise, labor becomes misdirected energy, until it’s yoked to the correct theology. Peace, in this view, is less a political project than a byproduct of right worship and right living.

Context matters: McKay led the LDS Church through world wars, the Cold War, and expanding global modernity. In an era hungry for secular plans and ideological fixes, this is a counteroffer that insists the crisis is spiritual at the root. It works because it turns a collective anxiety into a simple diagnostic: if peace fails, the problem isn’t the world’s complexity; it’s humanity’s refusal to follow the light.