Daily Inspiration Quote by Ed Harris

Strip away the flags and holy slogans, Ed Harris suggests, and you find a far less poetic engine: money. The line is built to puncture the comforting myth that wars are primarily about ancient hatreds. “Mostly forget” is doing pointed work here; it’s not naive enough to deny identity entirely, but it insists that ethnicity and religion are often the theater, not the script. What’s driving the plot is “a bigger share,” the language of office politics and corporate squabbles scaled up to bloodshed. That phrasing deliberately shrinks the supposed grandeur of conflict into something venal and legible.

The subtext is accusation: when public narratives fixate on “tribal” differences, they conveniently absolve the structures that actually distribute power and wealth. Harris is gesturing toward a familiar pattern in oil-rich regions where control of pipelines, royalties, and state budgets determines who eats and who starves. Identity becomes a mobilizing tool, a way to recruit bodies and justify violence, while the real beneficiaries are those positioned to skim revenues or capture the state apparatus that allocates them.

Coming from an actor, the statement also reads like a performer’s backstage note: don’t confuse the costume for the character. Harris has long gravitated toward roles that mistrust official stories and spotlight institutional corruption, and the quote carries that same skeptical, plainspoken bite. It’s not academic; it’s a demystification meant to make the audience look past the noisy surface and follow the money.