War & Peace Quote by Ossie Davis

Davis frames hardship less as a tragic detour than as a training ground, and that’s a pointed choice coming from an actor-activist who spent his public life watching America congratulate itself while it stalled on justice. “Struggle is strengthening” has the cadence of a locker-room mantra, but it’s not motivational fluff; it’s political muscle memory. The sentence is built like a call-and-response: struggle produces strength, and strength is meant to be spent. No spiritual bypassing, no promise that suffering is inherently noble. The payoff is pragmatic: the fight changes the fighter.

The subtext is almost tactical. Davis isn’t romanticizing evil as a necessary ingredient in personal growth; he’s insisting that confronting it builds capacity for the next round because the next round is coming. That second line loops back on itself - “battle evil even more” - and the repetition does a quiet kind of work. It suggests that justice isn’t a single victory you cash in; it’s endurance, organization, and an expanding sense of what you’re willing to challenge.

Context matters: Davis came up in an era when civil rights required constant pressure, and even symbolic wins were followed by backlash, dilution, and fatigue. As a performer, he also understood that progress has a public stage and a private cost. The quote turns that cost into a resource, not because pain is good, but because resistance teaches strategy, solidarity, and nerve. It’s a hard-edged optimism: the world is hostile, so get stronger - not to survive it, but to keep pushing it back.