Education Quote by M. F. K. Fisher

Fisher takes the ugliest human project and refuses both of its easy consolations: glamor and despair. "War is a beastly business" lands with the plain-spoken disgust of someone who won’t aestheticize suffering. Then she pivots, not to patriotism or redemption, but to a cooler, more unsettling claim: that our humanity is measurable by what we can extract from catastrophe.

The sentence is engineered like a moral stress test. "It is true" functions as a little brake on rhetoric, a writer’s insistence on accuracy before meaning. The real charge sits in "one proof we are human": Fisher is wary of grand declarations about human nature, so she offers a small, defensible metric. Not that humans are good, but that humans can learn. That’s a low bar, and that’s the point. In wartime, idealism collapses; survival becomes logistics. Fisher’s subtext is that ethics, too, becomes logistics: how to exist with fewer illusions and more care.

Coming from a food and cultural writer who lived through the world wars and wrote about appetite, scarcity, and daily life, the line reads like a domestic rebuke to martial myth. War rearranges what matters: bread lines, letters, communal meals, private grief. "How better to exist" isn’t triumphalist; it’s a modest, almost culinary phrase, about method rather than purity. Fisher implies that the only honest "lesson" war offers is a sharper attention to living - to bodies, needs, and the fragile practices that make a life civil.