War & Peace Quote by Ben Shahn

Shahn is puncturing the piety of slogans. “War on poverty” has the ring of moral certainty, a phrase designed to travel well in speeches and headlines. He calls it out as almost weightless: it “doesn’t mean very much” until it’s tethered to something you can see. Coming from an artist who made a career out of social realism, that’s not anti-politics; it’s a demand for evidence, for the hard specificity that rhetoric tends to sand down.

The looping, slightly clumsy cadence matters. Shahn isn’t delivering a polished manifesto; he’s thinking aloud, insisting that “this sort of thing” (a photograph, a drawing, a documented scene) can reveal “a great deal more” than official language ever admits. The subtext is that poverty thrives in abstraction. Once reduced to a target in a “war,” it becomes an administrative problem, a budget line, a battlefield metaphor that flatters the state’s heroism. Shahn flips the power dynamic: the poor aren’t an enemy to be defeated; they’re people whose conditions must be shown, named, and made impossible to ignore.

Context sharpens the point. Shahn lived through the Great Depression, the New Deal’s documentary moment, and later the postwar boom that encouraged Americans to mistake prosperity for consensus. By the 1960s, when “war on poverty” became a policy brand, he’s warning that branding can anesthetize. Images, stories, and lived detail don’t just illustrate poverty; they indict the distance between national self-mythology and “a very great percentage” of everyday life.