‘The world as given’

"On Decoration Day" (the earlier name of Memorial Day) political cartoon c. 1900 by John T. McCutcheon. Caption: "You bet I'm goin' to be a soldier, too, like my Uncle David, when I grow up."

“To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.”

―John Updike (1932-2009), American novelist, short-story writer, essayist and literary and art critic. He spent most of his life on the Massachusetts North Shore.