War & Peace Quote by Ludwig Quidde

Quidde is skewering a particular kind of pacifism that, in its obsession with safety, accidentally starts talking like the militarists it means to oppose. The line is built around a deliberate reversal: security is conceded as a "sound idea", then immediately shown to metastasize into an alibi for doing nothing. By pushing the logic to its endpoint - disarmament is "superfluous and pointless" until "eternal peace" - he exposes how a supposedly moral stance can become a demand for impossible preconditions. If you require a utopia before taking any steps toward it, you guarantee the status quo.

The subtext is that political arguments often smuggle in a preferred outcome through the language of prudence. "Prime importance of security" is the respectable framing; "eternal peace" is the trapdoor. Quidde is naming the move where risk management becomes risk paralysis, where the fear of vulnerability turns into an excuse to keep the arsenal intact. The word choice matters: "carried...too far" suggests a slippery escalation, not a caricature; he is chastising allies, not enemies, which makes the critique sharper.

Contextually, Quidde is writing from the shadowed landscape of European militarism and its catastrophic consequences. A German liberal critic who lived through the arms races and nationalist fever that culminated in World War I, he understood how easily peace rhetoric can be co-opted by the very structures that profit from perpetual readiness. His warning is less about pacifists being naive than about them being rhetorically outmaneuvered by their own absolutism: demanding guarantees of peace before disarming is just another way to keep the guns loaded forever.