Life & Wisdom Quote by L. M. Heroux

“War is the symptom, not the disease” is a scalpel of a sentence: it cuts past the spectacle of battles and flags to diagnose the quieter machinery that makes violence feel inevitable. Heroux’s intent is corrective. Treating war as the main problem flatters politicians and publics alike because it suggests a clean fix: sign a treaty, win decisively, “restore peace.” Calling it a symptom denies that comfort. Symptoms return when the underlying condition stays untreated.

The subtext is moral and political at once. War becomes less a tragic accident than a recurring flare-up of deeper pathologies: nationalism sold as identity, economic extraction dressed up as security, grievance cultivated as heritage, propaganda posing as patriotism. The line quietly shifts responsibility from “bad leaders” or “ancient hatreds” to systems and incentives that outlive any single regime. It also indicts the media-friendly focus on fronts and casualties while neglecting the upstream causes: inequality, imperial ambition, arms economies, and the social permission structure that lets cruelty be called necessity.

Context matters. Heroux, writing in the long shadow of the 20th century’s industrialized slaughter, lands in a period when war was increasingly managed like a policy tool and narrated like a temporary emergency. The aphorism resists that framing. It’s not pacifist naivete; it’s a demand for diagnosis. If war is a symptom, then “ending the war” is only triage. The real prescription is dismantling the conditions that keep producing it - even when peace, on paper, has already been declared.