Creativity Quote by Salvador Dali

Dali’s line lands like a prank with a blade in it: a seemingly obvious statement that exposes how routinely war gets laundered into abstraction. “Wars have never hurt anybody” is the kind of sentence you’d expect from a bureaucrat or a propaganda poster, the voice that treats conflict as strategy, destiny, or a necessary “operation.” Then Dali snaps the mask off with the clause that matters: “except the people who die.” The joke is grammatical but moral. It forces the reader to notice who gets counted when societies do their wartime math.

The intent isn’t to offer a tidy pacifist slogan; it’s to mock the language that makes violence feel clean. Dali, a Surrealist, understood how reality can be edited by narrative and spectacle. War sells itself as heroism, renewal, or national therapy, and that story has room for medals, borders, and speeches. It rarely has room for bodies. By making death the lone exemption, he spotlights the obscene hierarchy of consequences: leaders gain legacies, industries gain contracts, nations gain myths, but the dead get erased from the balance sheet because they can’t complain.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Dali lived through the Spanish Civil War and World War II, eras when mass death was paired with mass messaging. His own politics were famously slippery, which makes this line feel less like a manifesto than a cold-eyed diagnosis of how people rationalize catastrophe. The subtext is simple and brutal: if you’re alive to debate whether war “hurts,” you’re already enjoying the privilege war protects.