War & Peace Quote by Hal Holbrook

Holbrook is giving you the actor's version of a warning label: Twain is not a slogan dispenser, he's a shape-shifter. Coming from the man who embodied Twain onstage for decades, the line reads like a defensive maneuver against lazy quotation culture and political cherry-picking. "You can...prove anything you want" isn't praise; it's an indictment of the reader's motive. The target isn't Twain's inconsistency so much as our hunger to conscript famous dead writers into today's arguments.

The brilliance is in the pivot from contradictions ("against war...for war") to a visual metaphor that forgives them. Calling Twain "a kaleidoscope" suggests pattern without fixed doctrine: turn the tube and the same shards make a new design. It's a performer speaking in images, reminding us that Twain's genius sits in persona, timing, and point of view - not in a stable party platform. Twain wrote as a satirist, a lecturer, a prankster, a moralist, sometimes in the same paragraph. Of course he's going to look like he "was for" and "against" everything, because satire works by inhabiting the enemy's logic long enough to expose its rot.

There's context in Holbrook's own career, too. His Twain was a one-man national mirror during Vietnam, Watergate, and the culture wars: audiences wanted a moral referee. Holbrook pushes back. The subtext: if you want certainty, don't go looking for it in an author whose whole method was to make certainty squirm.