War & Peace Quote by Anthony Eden

Eden’s line lands like a rebuke delivered with a diplomat’s gloves still on. “Temporary appeasement” is a deliberately narrowing phrase: it concedes that concessions can buy time, calm headlines, and soothe jittery markets. But it also quarantines that success as short-term theater, not strategy. The sentence is built on a classic statesman’s contrast - the cheap currency of “appeasement” versus the hard reserve of “lasting peace” - and the repetition of “gain” turns foreign policy into a moral ledger. You might balance today’s books, Eden implies, but you’re mortgaging the future.

The subtext is aimed at two audiences at once. To the public, it flatters the desire for peace while warning that peace purchased from violence is counterfeit. To political elites, it’s a reminder that violence is not just a tactic; it’s a negotiating style. Reward it and you teach it. “Concession to violence” frames the issue as cause-and-effect: the aggressor’s methods are the problem, not merely their demands. Eden’s insistence on “that way” matters too; he’s not romanticizing war, he’s rejecting a specific pathway that confuses quiet with stability.

Context does the heavy lifting. Eden came of age in the shadow of Europe’s interwar bargains and the tainted legacy of appeasement, a word that by mid-century had become both diagnosis and insult. The quote works because it compresses a traumatic lesson into a clean, defensible principle: peace isn’t the absence of conflict today; it’s the absence of incentives to recreate it tomorrow.