"War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost"
About this Quote
Quasimodo isn’t talking about battlefield tactics; he’s talking about moral weather. “Forces men to change their standards” is a blunt admission that war doesn’t merely test values - it rewrites them under pressure, then pretends the revision was inevitable. The sting is in “regardless of whether their country has won or lost.” Victory, the comforting story nations tell themselves, doesn’t restore the prewar self. Defeat doesn’t uniquely corrupt. Either outcome leaves people altered: what once felt unthinkable becomes practical, what once felt sacred becomes negotiable, what once felt private becomes subordinate to collective survival.
The intent is quietly accusatory. Quasimodo is warning that the real casualty of war is a society’s baseline for decency - and that the postwar scramble to declare “we were on the right side” misses the deeper damage. Standards change not just because atrocities happen, but because institutions normalize emergency measures: censorship becomes “security,” suspicion becomes “patriotism,” cruelty becomes “necessity.” The quote refuses the romantic myth that war is a clarifying event that reveals character; instead, it suggests war is a distorting event that manufactures new rules and then dares you to call them temporary.
Context matters: Quasimodo, an Italian poet who lived through fascism and World War II, saw how quickly a nation can retune its conscience to match the regime’s frequency. His line reads like a postmortem written in real time - not an abstract pacifist slogan, but a grim observation from inside a century where “winning” often meant inheriting the moral compromises that made winning possible.
The intent is quietly accusatory. Quasimodo is warning that the real casualty of war is a society’s baseline for decency - and that the postwar scramble to declare “we were on the right side” misses the deeper damage. Standards change not just because atrocities happen, but because institutions normalize emergency measures: censorship becomes “security,” suspicion becomes “patriotism,” cruelty becomes “necessity.” The quote refuses the romantic myth that war is a clarifying event that reveals character; instead, it suggests war is a distorting event that manufactures new rules and then dares you to call them temporary.
Context matters: Quasimodo, an Italian poet who lived through fascism and World War II, saw how quickly a nation can retune its conscience to match the regime’s frequency. His line reads like a postmortem written in real time - not an abstract pacifist slogan, but a grim observation from inside a century where “winning” often meant inheriting the moral compromises that made winning possible.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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