War & Peace Quote by Corazon Aquino

Aquino’s line refuses the lazy happy ending. It’s not a plea for calm; it’s an argument about durability. “Reconciliation” is the word people reach for when they want history to stop being inconvenient, when the powerful prefer a national reset button over a reckoning. Aquino answers with a condition: reconciliation only holds if it is tethered to justice. Otherwise it’s a truce between unequals, a pause that lets old hierarchies quietly reassemble.

The sentence is built like a warning label. “Should be accompanied” sounds almost gentle, but the subtext is steel: without accountability, peace is temporary theater. Then she sharpens it with the most politically dangerous phrase in any transition period: “not…at any cost.” That’s a direct pushback against the post-dictatorship temptation to trade truth for stability, to grant amnesia in exchange for quiet streets.

Context does a lot of work here. Aquino became the democratic face of the Philippines after Marcos, leading a fragile government with coup threats, entrenched elites, and victims demanding redress. Her rhetoric has to keep two audiences in view: citizens hungry for change and institutions anxious about upheaval. So she frames justice not as vengeance but as principle, something that legitimizes peace rather than disrupts it.

It’s also a subtle critique of “unity” as a weapon. Aquino insists that peace without justice isn’t peace; it’s deferred conflict, with the bill arriving later, higher, and paid by the people who already suffered first.