War & Peace Quote by David Horowitz

Peace, in Horowitz's telling, is not a virtue but a luxury item: you only get to want it when the other side isn’t actively trying to erase you. The line is engineered to puncture the pieties of negotiation-speak. It’s blunt to the point of moral impatience, collapsing the gray zone between “adversary” and “murderer” into a single category that forecloses compromise. If someone wants you dead, “peace” stops being a policy option and starts sounding like denial.

The intent is political triage. Horowitz isn’t merely warning about danger; he’s arguing against the legitimacy of engagement itself. The phrasing “someone who wants to kill you” is intentionally broad: it can mean terrorists, regimes, ideologues, or any enemy cast as existential. That elasticity is the point. Once the opponent is defined by annihilatory desire, every conciliatory gesture can be framed as naive, even complicit. The argument doesn’t need to prove what the other side will do; it needs only to insist on what they “want.”

Subtext: calls for diplomacy are recast as fantasies indulged by people insulated from stakes. It also shifts the moral burden. If peace fails, it’s not because force escalated or politics hardened, but because the enemy’s nature made peace impossible.

Contextually, Horowitz’s career arcs from New Left activism to combative conservative polemics, especially in post-9/11 debates about Islamism, Israel, and “appeasement.” The quote works because it’s hard to argue with in the abstract; its power lies in how easily it can be applied, and how quickly it turns complexity into a litmus test.