War & Peace Quote by George Ade

Peace of mind, Ade suggests, is less a wellness product than a small act of rebellion. The line is built like a self-help slogan and then quietly sabotages itself: “To insure” mimics the language of prudence and policy, as if tranquility were something you could purchase with paperwork. But the prescription is the opposite of compliant. Ignore the rules. Ignore the regulations. Ade’s joke is that modern life sells us calm through the very machinery that manufactures anxiety.

As a playwright and newspaper humorist working in the early 20th century, Ade lived in the age of expanding bureaucracy: industrial workplaces, municipal codes, Progressive Era “reform,” and the growing sense that daily life was being standardized by committees and clerks. In that world, rules weren’t just moral guidance; they were systems with teeth, producing a low-grade dread of doing something wrong in public, at work, at the bank. Ade’s punchline exploits that dread. If the rules are what make you nervous, stop letting them into your head.

The subtext, though, isn’t a full-throated call for lawlessness. It’s a spotlight on how “peace of mind” is often achieved by selective ignorance: refusing to read the fine print, declining to internalize every admonition, letting a little disorder exist without turning it into a crisis. Ade’s wit lands because it flatters the reader’s private suspicion that a lot of regulation is theater - authority performing competence - and that sanity sometimes requires opting out of the performance.