War & Peace Quote by Eamon de Valera

De Valera’s language is engineered to look outward while staying rigorously inside Ireland’s chosen posture of neutrality. “Since this war began our sympathy has gone out…” is less a burst of compassion than a diplomatic instrument: sympathy is the one currency a small state can spend freely without committing troops, bases, or alliances. He frames Ireland as morally awake but strategically unentangled, a nation that can acknowledge catastrophe without being conscripted into someone else’s war aims.

The phrasing does quiet work. “Dragged into it” smuggles in a moral hierarchy: the true victims are populations compelled by empires and aggressors, not just combatants trading blows. It also flatters an Irish self-image shaped by colonial memory - Ireland understands coercion, therefore Ireland can speak with special authority about coerced suffering. That move turns neutrality from mere self-preservation into an ethical stance.

The second sentence is bureaucratically plain but rhetorically potent. “Further hundreds of millions…” uses scale as argument: the war is metastasizing, swallowing countries and civilians in waves. He anchors it in a domestic timestamp - “since I spoke at Limerick fortnight ago” - collapsing the global into the local, reminding listeners that history is accelerating on their calendar, not in abstract dispatches.

Context matters: de Valera was constantly balancing genuine humanitarian concern, fear of invasion, internal divisions, and the need to defend sovereignty against British pressure. The intent is to mourn without mobilizing, to register the world’s agony while reinforcing the message that Ireland’s first duty is to remain unpulled, unclaimed, and unprovoked.