Leadership Quote by Eddie Bernice Johnson

A line like this lands because it treats an ugly temptation as something ordinary enough to name: the reflex to translate moral certainty into violence. Eddie Bernice Johnson’s blunt “we can’t” isn’t hand-wringing; it’s a boundary. The phrasing is deliberately unglamorous, almost parental, and that’s the point. It deflates the elevated rhetoric that so often accompanies interventionism - the talk of “liberation,” “security,” “values” - by reducing it to its most damning skeleton: killing people because we disagree with them.

The intent is strategic restraint wrapped in moral clarity. Johnson isn’t merely arguing policy; she’s challenging the habit of dressing power up as principle. “All over the world” widens the indictment from a single conflict to a pattern, implying a roving mandate the U.S. has repeatedly claimed for itself. “Disagree” is the knife twist: it reframes enemies not as existential threats but as political differences, exposing how quickly “they hate our freedom” can become a permission slip for force.

Subtextually, it’s also a critique of audience complicity. The sentence assumes a “we” - citizens, lawmakers, the national imagination - and asks whether our default settings are empire and punishment. Coming from a long-serving member of Congress, the comment carries insider weight: it reads less like naive pacifism than like someone tired of watching wars sold as inevitabilities when they’re choices, funded and authorized by people in rooms.