War & Peace Quote by Cordell Hull

Hull builds his case with a calm voice and a throttled sense of alarm, the kind of rhetoric designed to sound reasonable even while it presses on the panic button. “Under the ominous shadow” is doing more than scene-setting: it casts World War II not as a discrete conflict but as a permanent atmospheric condition, something that darkens every decision and justifies extraordinary measures. The phrase “attendant circumstances” is bureaucratic understatement at work - a public servant’s way of smuggling in mass displacement, economic ruin, and ideological contagion without naming them, and without letting the sentence turn into a scream.

Then comes the masterstroke: peace isn’t framed as a moral aspiration or a diplomatic preference. It’s treated as infrastructure. By likening peace to air, Hull strips the debate of romance and replaces it with physiology. You can argue about policies; you don’t argue about breathing. The analogy pressures the listener into accepting urgency and inevitability: if peace is air, any political actor impeding it becomes a suffocator, not merely an opponent.

Context matters. Hull, as FDR’s Secretary of State and a key architect of the postwar international order, is speaking from inside the project of selling collective security to an American public historically wary of entanglements. “Civilized existence” is a pointed phrase: it flatters the audience as guardians of a threatened standard of life, while warning that without coordinated action, “civilization” itself can revert - not abstractly, but materially. The intent is persuasive discipline: make peace feel nonoptional, then make institutions that promise it feel like basic necessities.