Leadership Quote by Jeanette Rankin

Rankin’s line strips war of every flattering costume we like to dress it in: honor, strategy, destiny. She defines it with prosecutorial bluntness - “slaughter” - and then drives the knife in deeper with “temporarily regarded as enemies.” That adverb is the indictment. It implies that enmity is not a natural fact but a political mood swing, an administrative classification that can be issued and revoked. The people being killed are not monsters; they’re humans who, in any other season, might be trading, marrying, studying abroad. War, in her framing, is less a clash of civilizations than a paperwork decision with body counts.

The phrase “on as large a scale as possible” mocks the supposed constraints of wartime necessity. It suggests that once violence is licensed, the logic of institutions is to maximize it: bigger budgets, bigger arsenals, bigger headlines, bigger victory parades. Rankin is attacking the machinery of escalation, the way modern states turn killing into an industrial achievement, then call it security.

Context matters. Rankin wasn’t a poet lobbing abstractions; she was a U.S. congresswoman and a committed pacifist who voted against American entry into both World Wars - once as the first woman in Congress, later as a lone dissenter after Pearl Harbor. That biography gives the quote its steel. It’s not naïveté about threats; it’s a refusal to let moral language be annexed by nationalism. Her intent is to make war unsayable in euphemisms, to force the listener to picture the human cost and the flimsy, reversible fiction of “enemy.”