War & Peace Quote by Harry Emerson Fosdick

War doesn’t just kill; it recruits. Fosdick’s line lands because it frames conflict as a moral perversion, not merely a political failure. The “tragedy” isn’t only the bodies or the ruins. It’s the twisted efficiency with which war conscripts virtues we claim to admire - courage, loyalty, discipline, sacrifice - and reroutes them toward organized harm. “Man’s best” becomes a raw material, processed into “man’s worst” with bureaucratic competence.

As a prominent American clergyman writing in the shadow of World War I and into the age of World War II, Fosdick is speaking from a pulpit that had to compete with patriotic fervor and the sanctification of violence. His phrasing is almost sermonic in its balance: best/worst, man/man. The symmetry creates a trap for easy hero narratives. You can’t dismiss the soldier’s bravery; Fosdick won’t let you. Instead he asks why bravery is being spent like currency on destruction rather than repair.

The subtext is a critique of the machinery that makes atrocity feel like duty. War, in his telling, is parasitic: it feeds on our highest capacities for commitment and meaning, then returns them as grief. That’s why the line endures. It doesn’t insult the people who serve; it indicts the system that exploits their nobility, turning devotion into devastation while calling it glory.