Parenting & Family Quote by Ilka Chase

“Wart hogs should sue for libel” is Ilka Chase doing a performer’s trick: landing the laugh with mock sympathy, then making you notice what the joke smuggles in. She starts by pretending the slur is unfair to the animal, not the human. That reversal is the whole engine. In one sentence she humanizes the hog and, by implication, de-humanizes the “war hog” enough to make the comparison sting.

The real bite is in the domestic tableau that follows: “fine fellows,” “devoted family men,” rarely alone, “the little woman and the kiddies” nearby. Chase isn’t praising them; she’s exposing the camouflage. War-making is framed as a respectable, paternal enterprise, escorted by wife-and-kids imagery that softens aggression into civic duty. The phrase “little woman” is pointedly old-fashioned, shrinking the spouse into a prop while also signaling the midcentury gender script that helps sell militarism: the man as protector-provider, the family as moral alibi.

As an actress writing with a showman’s timing, Chase leans on bright, almost breezy diction to make a sharp moral observation feel conversational. The subtext: the most dangerous advocates of violence aren’t cartoon villains twirling mustaches; they’re socially legible, likable, even “family men.” That’s why the line works as cultural critique. It targets not only warmongers, but the way public life grants them automatic credibility when they arrive wrapped in wholesome domesticity.