War & Peace Quote by Ludwig von Mises

War doesn’t get defeated by better tactics or bigger budgets, Mises argues, but by a cultural veto: a mental posture that refuses to see war as anything but pure loss. Coming from an economist, the move is pointed. He’s stripping war of its usual alibis - honor, destiny, “national interest,” moral purification - and reducing it to what it produces in the ledger of human life: smashed capital, dead labor, broken families, ruined trust. The line reads like a weapon aimed at the romantic narratives that make war politically sellable.

The key phrase is “attitude of mind.” Mises isn’t describing a policy program so much as a precondition for policy. Peace treaties, alliances, deterrence - these are downstream. Upstream is the public’s imaginative framework: whether people can still be persuaded that war is tragic but meaningful, destructive but necessary, violent but ennobling. His insistence on “nothing… but” is intentionally absolutist. It denies the very category of “productive destruction,” a phrase modern economies flirt with whenever wars are framed as stimulus, technological leap, or national renewal.

Context matters. Mises wrote in the shadow of Europe’s catastrophic wars and the rise of mass politics that could mobilize whole societies through myth. His subtext is liberal and anti-collectivist: once you treat individuals as expendable units of a national project, war becomes thinkable, even thrilling. The antidote isn’t pacifist sentimentality; it’s moral clarity so stubborn it makes war culturally illegitimate, not merely costly.