Life & Mortality Quote by Plato

A line like this is less prophecy than provocation: a cold splash of realism aimed at anyone tempted by fantasies of permanent peace. Plato’s phrasing turns “the end of war” into a horizon that recedes the moment you walk toward it. The barb is in the grammar. “Only” makes the claim absolute, and “the dead” makes it unanswerable. If you’re alive, you’re implicated; if you disagree, you don’t get to prove it. It’s philosophical trap-setting disguised as a lament.

The subtext is not that war is admirable or inevitable in some mystical way, but that human conflict is baked into the conditions of political life: scarcity, fear, pride, competing loyalties. In Plato’s world, the city-state is an engine of rivalry, and civic identity is forged partly through opposition. The line also quietly indicts those who treat war as a discrete episode with a neat closing ceremony. For the living, war mutates: hot into cold, battlefield into border policy, swords into sanctions, heroism into bureaucracy.

Context matters. Plato wrote in the shadow of the Peloponnesian War and Athens’ humiliation, a period that made “rational” politics look like a thin coat of paint over faction, ambition, and revenge. His broader project in the Republic is an attempt to design a city that disciplines these impulses; this sentence acknowledges how stubborn they are. It works because it refuses consolation. Peace becomes not a destination but a temporary armistice life keeps renegotiating, until it doesn’t.