War & Peace Quote by William Kirby

War, Kirby suggests, is less a thunderclap than a slow administrative drift. The line “never inevitable until it starts” looks like a tidy paradox, but it’s doing pointed work: puncturing the comforting story that conflict is fate. He’s not denying momentum or grievance; he’s denying the moral alibi. If war isn’t inevitable until the instant it becomes fact, then every step before that instant remains a choice - and a responsibility.

The second clause tightens the screws. “Great proclivity” is a scientist’s euphemism for a recurring human failure, a phrase that sounds like taxonomy while indicting behavior. Kirby’s diction turns history into a lab report: the species has patterns, and one of them is self-destruction. That coolness is the subtext. By refusing prophetic language, he refuses the romance of war and the rhetoric leaders use to make it sound like weather.

Context matters here. Living from 1759 to 1850, Kirby’s lifetime brackets the American Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and near-constant European conflict. For an Enlightenment-era scientist watching modernity advertise itself as progress, “recent history” is an acidic aside: even with reason, institutions, and science, humans keep defaulting to organized violence.

The intent isn’t pacifist poetry; it’s an argument against determinism. Kirby frames war as the final click of a mechanism that people keep winding - then pretending they didn’t.