War & Peace Quote by Sargent Shriver

Shriver’s line lands like a rebuke disguised as reassurance: if war always presents itself as the tragic default, then peace is framed as a naive novelty. He flips that script. “There is an alternative” is deliberately plainspoken, almost bureaucratic, the kind of sentence a politician uses when trying to make a moral claim sound like a practical option on the table. Then he tightens the screw: “It has been with us forever.” Peace isn’t an experiment. It’s the older technology.

The subtext is aimed at the alibis nations use when they reach for violence: inevitability, realism, human nature. By insisting the alternative has existed “forever,” Shriver punctures the fashionable cynicism that treats war as history’s engine and diplomacy as its afterthought. He also smuggles in a challenge to American self-mythology in the Cold War and Vietnam era, when militarized resolve was packaged as maturity and restraint was painted as weakness. Shriver, as the architect of the Peace Corps and a major figure in the liberal, service-oriented wing of U.S. politics, understood that “alternative” isn’t just ceasefires and treaties; it’s institution-building, development, and the slow, unglamorous work of making enemies unnecessary.

What makes the line work rhetorically is its quiet refusal to match war’s theatricality. No soaring anthem, no apocalyptic warning. Just a reminder that the most radical idea in politics is often the simplest one: we don’t have to do this, and we never did.