War & Peace Quote by Douglas William Jerrold

There’s a trapdoor hidden in the tenderness of “We love peace”: it sounds like moral high ground, then pivots into a warning. Jerrold, a dramatist with a satirist’s timing, builds the line like a stage beat. First he establishes a shared virtue - peace as the respectable desire everyone can applaud. Then he yanks the audience into the uncomfortable part: “but not peace at any price.” The word “price” is the tell. Peace stops being an ideal and becomes a transaction, something that can be bought with concessions, humiliation, or the quiet surrender of principle.

The intent is less about celebrating peace than policing it. Jerrold is drawing a boundary around what counts as legitimate peace versus a counterfeit version: peace that functions as appeasement, or as a cover story for fear. The subtext is suspicious of softness masquerading as wisdom. It implies that there are moments when conflict is the cleaner moral choice, because the alternative is consent to coercion.

Context matters: Jerrold wrote in an era of British political reform battles, imperial confidence, and public moralizing, when “peace” could be invoked to shut down dissent or justify inaction. As a man of the theater, he understood the politics of applause lines - how a crowd can be seduced by soothing abstractions. This sentence interrupts that seduction. It’s a compact piece of cultural self-defense: a refusal to let “peace” become a rhetorical hostage-taker, demanding your dignity as ransom.