War & Peace Quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt

Roosevelt isn’t offering a pious wish for peace; he’s indicting war as a policy tool and, in the same breath, selling an alternative as the only adult option. The pivot is the phrase “end to the beginning of all wars.” Ending a war is reactive, episodic, almost routine. Ending the beginning reframes conflict as something engineered: wars don’t just happen, they’re started by choices, incentives, and failures of institutions. That subtle grammatical shift turns “peace” from a mood into a design problem.

The subtext is a challenge to the old diplomatic masculinity that treated war as inevitable, even cleansing. By calling war “brutal” and “inhuman,” Roosevelt appeals to moral revulsion; by calling it “thoroughly impractical,” he speaks to the harder audience: legislators, taxpayers, industrial planners, isolationists who might shrug at moral language but can’t ignore cost, inefficiency, and blowback. The line is built to bridge idealism and realism without admitting the contradiction.

Context matters. Roosevelt governed through the trauma of World War I’s “war to end war,” the disillusionment that followed, and the Great Depression’s demands for stability at home. His administration watched fascism rise and understood that American security was no longer protected by oceans or good intentions. This is the rhetorical groundwork for a postwar order: collective security, rule-making, and international bodies meant to interrupt the chain of escalations before they harden into battle plans. He’s not promising human nature will improve. He’s arguing that the system must.