War & Peace Quote by Adlai E. Stevenson

Stevenson takes an ancient proverb and gives it Cold War muscle. The “journey of a thousand leagues” is the kind of long-view moral ambition politicians love to invoke; the twist is the second sentence, where he narrows that grandeur into something almost bureaucratic: “any work of peace within our reach, however small.” The intent is practical persuasion. He’s arguing against the paralyzing logic of all-or-nothing geopolitics, where only a sweeping treaty counts and anything less is dismissed as symbolism.

The subtext is a critique of macho fatalism in foreign policy. In the 1950s and early 1960s, when nuclear strategy encouraged abstraction and brinkmanship, “peace” could become a rhetorical ornament while the machinery of deterrence kept grinding. Stevenson, a liberal internationalist and famously a UN-facing public voice during moments like the Cuban Missile Crisis, is insisting that incrementalism isn’t weakness; it’s the only sane unit of progress when catastrophe is the baseline risk.

What makes the line work is its two-step rhythm: first, it flatters the listener with epic scale; then it assigns a modest, immediate duty. “Within our reach” quietly shifts responsibility from nations and leaders to whoever’s being addressed - diplomats, citizens, bureaucrats, voters. It’s also a rebuke to cynicism dressed up as realism. Stevenson implies that neglecting “small” acts of peace isn’t neutrality; it’s choosing drift, and drift in his era had consequences measured in megatons.