War & Peace Quote by Roy Jenkins

Jenkins is warning against a distinctly political temptation: turning moral seriousness into a veto. "The best" sounds noble, even brave; it also becomes a convenient refuge for purists who can always find a reason to reject a workable compromise. The line works because it flips an aspirational instinct into a liability. Idealism isn’t attacked outright, but it’s treated as something that can quietly sabotage progress when it demands total victory up front.

The phrasing matters. "Always" and "great dangers" aren’t hedges; they’re a seasoned operator’s insistence that this is a repeating pattern, not a one-off failure of nerve. And "letting" points to agency: the enemy relationship isn’t inevitable, it’s chosen - often by people who prefer the clean posture of refusal to the messy accountability of governing.

Jenkins, a prominent British reformist and later a key figure in the SDP breakaway, lived in a political culture where coalition-building, incremental policy, and party discipline collide daily. In that context, the quote reads like a brief against ideological maximalism on both left and right: the demand for purity can become a luxury belief, one that costs real people tangible improvements. It’s also a quiet rebuke to the performative politics of being "more right" than effective.

Subtextually, Jenkins is defending the art of the possible without romanticizing it. He’s arguing that results count, and that refusing "good" policies because they fall short of an imagined "best" isn’t principled - it’s a form of surrender dressed as virtue.