Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ’War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.’

The remark rebukes a recurring intellectual temptation: to aestheticize or moralize war as a force that “ennobles” peoples by cultivating courage, discipline, or civic virtue. Against this, the speaker appeals to an older Greek maxim that treats war not as a purifier but as a generator of further wrongdoing—violence breeding retaliation, cruelty, and moral corrosion beyond the battlefield’s immediate deaths. The contrast implies that philosophical praise of war often rests on selective memory and abstraction, ignoring war’s self-propagating ethical and political consequences. The quote thus functions as a critique of romantic militarism and a warning that war’s harms are not only quantitative (lives lost) but qualitative (evils multiplied).