Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.

Carlin’s line is a deliberately crude paradox meant to puncture the rhetoric of “war for peace.” By pairing a lofty political slogan with an act that, by definition, negates its stated goal, he argues that certain means are intrinsically incompatible with their proclaimed ends. The joke’s force comes from moral and logical collision: violence cannot reliably produce the condition it destroys, just as the act described cannot preserve the status it claims to protect. In Carlin’s broader satirical style, the obscenity is not incidental but strategic—used to strip euphemism from public language and expose what he saw as self-justifying propaganda around militarism.

• “Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.”
• “Fighting for peace is like screwing for chastity.”