No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war.

Roosevelt contrasts the emotional and moral drama of wartime victory with the quieter achievements of peacetime. The line suggests that war, at its “supreme” moments, produces a kind of exaltation—public unity, sacrifice, and decisive outcomes—that ordinary civic progress rarely matches in intensity or spectacle. Read critically, it reflects Roosevelt’s well-known martial idealism: the belief that strenuous struggle can ennoble individuals and nations. At the same time, the phrasing (“quite so great”) implies a hierarchy of glory that can be used to justify militarism, undervaluing the less visible but often more enduring “triumphs of peace” such as institution-building, diplomacy, and social reform.