War & Peace Quote by Murray Rothbard

War isn’t a tragic exception for the modern state, Rothbard suggests; it’s the state’s natural habitat. The line is built like a trap: “thrives,” “expands,” “glories” are verbs of health and appetite, not reluctant necessity. Then he snaps in the caveat - “unless, of course, it is defeated and crushed” - a dry aside that mocks the usual patriotic framing. Yes, war can kill a state; that’s the point. Short of annihilation, conflict is portrayed as an accelerant for everything governments want more of: revenue, authority, obedience, narrative control.

The subtext is classic Rothbard: the state isn’t a neutral umpire that occasionally goes to war; it’s an institution structurally rewarded by war’s conditions. War centralizes decision-making, suspends norms, and turns dissent into suspect behavior. It also makes the state feel morally larger than life. “Glories in it” is the most indicting phrase: not merely exploiting war, but savoring the emotional high - the pageantry, the myth of unity, the permission to treat complexity as betrayal.

Context matters. Rothbard writes from a 20th-century American arc where “temporary” wartime measures became permanent administrative architecture, from World War mobilization through the Cold War national security state and Vietnam-era backlash. He’s arguing against the romantic idea that the state’s coercive growth is accidental. The sentence works because it reframes war as policy’s most effective marketing campaign: fear and pride sold as civic virtue, with power as the real dividend.