War & Peace Quote by Rene Cassin

There is a quiet militancy in Cassin's phrasing: not the militancy of the trenches, but of committees, charters, and votes. "We were thus led" makes the move from carnage to institution feel less like a choice than an inevitability, as if history itself is pushing survivors toward organization. That passive construction also masks a hard truth: after World War I, inertia was the default, and building anything durable required pressure, coordination, and an almost religious insistence that memory be converted into policy.

Cassin frames legitimacy in a particular way: "men who had fought the war together". Shared sacrifice becomes a credential, a moral passport into political influence. The subtext is exclusionary and strategic at once. In an era when civilians, ideologues, and opportunists all claimed to interpret the war, Cassin elevates the veteran as the authorized reader of catastrophe. Experience is offered not as trauma but as expertise.

The target is telling, too: "those statesmen who had truly understood the lessons". Cassin isn't praising leadership in general; he's drawing a line between leaders who metabolize disaster into reforms and leaders who sentimentalize it into slogans. This is the interwar warning shot: pacifist platitudes and nationalist revanche both failed, because neither translated grief into governance.

As a judge, Cassin’s faith sits in the architecture of prevention: align political power behind the right interpreters of the past, then build rules strong enough to outlast mood swings. The phrase "attempting to prevent its recurrence" carries modesty that reads as realism. After 1914-18, certainty was propaganda; "attempting" is the honest word of someone trying to make law compete with fate.