War & Peace Quote by Cordell Hull

The line lands with the weary force of someone who has watched “peace” get declared like a ribbon-cutting, only to see it collapse on schedule. Cordell Hull isn’t selling optimism; he’s issuing a burden. By calling peace the “greater responsibility,” he reframes it from aspiration to obligation, shifting the moral center of postwar politics: governments aren’t merely tasked with defending borders or growing economies, they’re on the hook for preventing the next catastrophe.

The key phrase is “this time - at long last.” It’s a quiet indictment. Hull is invoking the interwar failure without naming it: treaties signed, speeches made, institutions underbuilt, isolationist moods indulged, grievances left to fester. The dash-loaded cadence reads like a man trying to force history to pay attention. Peace, in his formulation, doesn’t “happen” after victory; it has to be engineered and continuously maintained, which is a pointed rejection of the fantasy that war ends itself once the shooting stops.

Context does a lot of the work here. Hull, Roosevelt’s Secretary of State and a prime architect of the UN, is speaking from the bloodstream of World War II diplomacy, when “never again” was becoming policy rather than slogan. The subtext is institutional: peace requires structures strong enough to outlast moods, elections, and revenge. It’s also collective: “peoples and governments everywhere” insists that responsibility can’t be outsourced to a single superpower or a handful of victors.

The intent is to make complacency sound like negligence. The rhetoric doesn’t flatter the audience; it drafts them.