War & Peace Quote by Oscar Hammerstein II

Hammerstein smuggles a radical political argument into plainspoken, stage-ready language: peace is not an event, it is maintenance. The opening move is a rejection of the fantasy that history can be wrapped up with a parade. By disowning “victory” and “command,” he punctures two seductive American myths at once: that wars end cleanly when the “good side” wins, and that order can be imposed from above by the right leader with the right words. Peace, in his framing, is less a trophy than a habit.

The sentence rhythm does the heavy lifting. “No finishing line, no final deadline, no fixed definition” stacks negations like a drumbeat, the way a lyric builds insistence through repetition. It’s a songwriter’s rhetoric: simple vocabulary, escalating cadence, memorable contrasts. He’s not arguing in policy terms; he’s rewiring the listener’s expectation of what peace should feel like. If peace has no “definition of achievement,” then it can’t be gamed, claimed, or branded. It can only be practiced.

The subtext is postwar and mid-century: a world learning that the end of fighting doesn’t automatically produce safety, justice, or trust. Coming from a Broadway figure, the line also carries a democratic impulse. “The work of many decisions” relocates responsibility from generals and presidents to citizens, neighbors, voters, parents. Peace becomes something you do in the ordinary: compromise, restraint, repair. That’s the quiet sting of the quote: if peace is process, you don’t get to outsource it.