War & Peace Quote by Dalton Trumbo

A provocation dressed up as a recruiting slogan, Trumbo’s line turns emancipation into logistics: free the enslaved, and you don’t just do the right thing, you manufacture an unbeatable force. The genius (and the sting) is that it frames morality as strategy, exposing how even the most righteous cause gets sold in the hard currency of power. “Can anybody get a bigger army than that?” lands like a dare, half sales pitch, half indictment of anyone who needs the pitch in the first place.

Trumbo, a novelist with a politician’s feel for pressure points, builds the sentence to widen its aperture: “every slave,” “every town and region.” Totalizing language does two jobs at once. It gives the vision a sweep that feels historically inevitable, while also implicating the whole system; slavery isn’t a local sin, it’s an infrastructure. The rhetorical question is a sneer at conventional militarism. Kings can conscript; empires can draft; but liberation creates soldiers who choose to fight because the fight is the condition of their new life.

The subtext is also darker: freedom is being pitched as useful. The enslaved are imagined as latent manpower, an “army” waiting to be activated. Trumbo’s era matters here. Writing in a century shaped by mass war, propaganda, and ideological loyalty tests (including his own blacklisting), he understood how states and movements justify themselves by counting bodies. The line dramatizes a brutal truth about American ideals: they often win not by purity, but by proving they’re the most formidable weapon on the field.