War & Peace Quote by Max Lerner

Peace, Lerner implies, is the easiest slogan in politics and the hardest reality in society. As a journalist who spent decades watching America argue about democracy while practicing segregation, union-busting, and Cold War paranoia, he treats "peace" not as a goal but as a public performance: something people can demand at full volume without changing the conditions that make conflict inevitable.

The line’s bite is in its conditional logic. "You may call" grants the protestor, the politician, even the pundit their microphone. It also quietly accuses them of mistaking noise for repair. Lerner’s "brotherhood" is deliberately old-fashioned and morally loaded, a word that sounds like church and civics class, which is part of its function: it names a form of solidarity that goes beyond ceasefires and treaties into the daily recognition of shared fate. Without that recognition, "peace" becomes merely the pause between eruptions - a truce maintained by force, fear, or exhaustion.

The subtext is a warning against cosmetic unity. A society can stop shooting and still be at war in its housing policy, its schools, its labor markets, its courts. Lerner is pushing readers to see conflict as structural, not episodic: if people don’t belong to one another, they won’t protect one another. His final phrase, "in the end", does the heaviest lifting. It concedes that order can be staged for a while, then insists that reality collects its debt.