War & Peace Quote by David Horowitz

Horowitz’s line is a blunt corrective aimed at people who treat politics like a seminar: noble positions, clean hands, predictable defeat. Its intent is disciplinary. It doesn’t invite debate so much as it draws a boundary around who deserves to be taken seriously. If your principles can’t survive contact with electoral reality, he implies, they’re closer to self-expression than governance.

The subtext is a hard-nosed ethic of consequences: legitimacy flows from victory, not virtue. “Winning” is framed as the moral prerequisite because it’s the only route to implementation. That rhetorical move quietly demotes process - compromise, persuasion, coalition-building, even restraint - into mere tools, valuable only insofar as they deliver power. It also smuggles in a binary: you’re either in the arena, playing to win, or you’re “sitting out,” an accusation that stings because it casts dissenters as cowards rather than conscientious objectors.

Context matters. Horowitz’s career arc from New Left participant to combative conservative polemicist made “the left” synonymous, in his writing, with institutional capture and cultural hegemony. Read that way, this quote doubles as marching orders for a movement that believes it’s been losing in universities, media, and bureaucracy: stop performing moral superiority and start accumulating leverage.

It works because it offers clarity in a messy system. It also courts danger: once winning becomes the only test, principles risk turning into branding - flexible slogans you wear on the way to power, then discard once you’ve got it.