War & Peace Quote by John Andrew Holmes

Peace, Holmes suggests, is the sentimental favorite that rarely survives contact with the body. The line turns on an ugly asymmetry: people will bleed for war, but treat peace as a lifestyle preference, something you applaud from a safe distance as long as it doesnt bruise your pride, your pocketbook, or your sense of national innocence. Its a scalpel of a sentence because it refuses the comforting fiction that peace is simply the absence of war; it frames peace as its own kind of combat, requiring sacrifice, restraint, and often humiliation.

The phrasing is deliberately domestic and physical: "wounds" makes the cost literal, not abstract. Holmes is poking at a culture that equates courage with aggression and mistakes conciliation for weakness. War comes prepackaged with narratives that flatter: honor, unity, heroism, clear enemies. Peace demands a different kind of bravery: accepting imperfect outcomes, bargaining with people you distrust, swallowing revenge, tolerating ambiguity. Those costs dont photograph well. They dont march in parades.

As a mid-20th-century journalist, Holmes is writing in the shadow of mass war and its glamorizing machinery: patriotic rhetoric, newspapers, political speeches that sell sacrifice as moral clarity. His intent isnt pacifist daydreaming; its a challenge to moral consistency. If we claim to love peace, why do we only fund, ritualize, and romanticize the injuries that war requires? The subtext is accusation: our devotion to peace is often performative, while our devotion to war is practical, organized, and, perversely, intimate.