Politics & Power Quote by Frank B. Kellogg

Kellogg is selling peace the way a seasoned politician sells any policy: by lowering expectations and narrowing the ask. He concedes the permanence of conflict up front, a shrewd move in the interwar years when idealism could sound like denial. Disputes will happen, publics will get “inflamed,” the threat of war will reappear. That realism functions as a credibility shield, letting him argue for restraint without pretending nations can be remade overnight.

The key word is “educate,” which shifts responsibility from generals and diplomats to mass opinion. Kellogg’s subtext is that war isn’t only a failure of statecraft; it’s a failure of the crowd. In the early 20th century, popular nationalism, headline-driven outrage, and political incentives could turn a border incident into a moral crusade. By urging people to be “ever mindful,” he frames peace less as a treaty clause than as a discipline: a habit of skepticism toward the emotional surge that makes violence feel inevitable.

Context matters because Kellogg’s name is attached to the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), the ambitious attempt to outlaw war as an instrument of national policy. The quote reads like the pact’s public-facing philosophy: if you can’t eliminate disputes, delegitimize war as the default tool for handling them. “Better means” is intentionally vague, allowing arbitration, diplomacy, and international law to sit under a single umbrella. It’s pragmatic messaging with a moral edge: war persists not because alternatives don’t exist, but because societies forget, in the heat of outrage, that they do.